Hi Allen,

You should be careful about what kind of failure we are talking about.

In my case, it was the failure of the interface card between the EIDE drive and the Firewire port. Note that you can't remove the interface card on the actual drive itself. Usually, the electronics are pretty hardy - it is the actual drive (Patters, read/write heads, disk motor, etc) that goes. For my case, it is a rare one - the electronics on the Firewire - EIDE card is dead.

But, all the so called Firewire hard-disks are basically EIDE drives internally. So, instead of buying a "relatively" expensive branded Firewire HD, you could save some money by going the route I have outlined.