Fire Wire or PCI

[baldo]

is there an advantage to fire wire over PCI or visa versa?

My PC is short on open bays but I do have a fire wire port.

Any suggestions?

thx

[Nika]

Baldo,

Currently Firewire is a fairly immature protocol that has not been fully developed. There will be a lot of improvements to Firewire over the next few generations, but at this time it is not fully implemented.

Because of that, MOTU has had some difficulties in utlizing the firewire to the level that it will one day be able to support. Currently it is not advised to have a firewire interface on the same firewire bus as a firewire harddrive. In the world of PCI this is generally not a problem. Further, MOTU can only have (1) 828 connected to a computer at one time. My guess is that down the road we will see entire systems built on the Firewire bus with dozens of i/o, but currently this is limited to one box.

If neither of these issues are significant to you then I don't see a disadvantage to using a firewire interface for your needs. There may be some advantages, actually, in being able to use PCI slots then for processing power rather than just your i/o.

I hope this helps!

Thanx!
Nika.

[baldo]

thx for the input. No pun intended.

[paulheu]

Originally posted by Nika


Currently it is not advised to have a firewire interface on the same firewire bus as a firewire harddrive.



I use a 2.4 GHz p4 laptop with both a HD (LaCie 7200RPM/120GB) and audio interface (Presonus Firestation) on the same firewire interface (SiteCom PCMCIA) without trouble.. I record from the interface to the HD without dropouts. This might be because the firestation is interfaced through mLan, but I'm not sure about this..

[DAS]

paulheu - the post you quoted was from July of 2001. Things change. FireWire is much, much more mature and stable now.