After my external USB drive died, i decided it would be a good idea to replace it with a FireWire drive. 

I went for a Lacie D2 Quadra 500 GB drive. It has two FireWire 800 ports, one FireWire 400, an eSATA and a USB port. This is now daisy chained with my larger Lacie drive and a Maxtor drive.

Between the larger Lacie FireWire 800 drive and the D2, i can get an average transfer rate of 30-40 megabytes per second.

On the whole, a good little drive, even if it did come with software to format it.