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Posted by: kassotis Sat 30 Apr 2005, 13:21

Hi,

I have an external firewire 400 hard drive and the rme fireface 800 audio unit.
I was thinking that it would be much better to use a cardbus on the pcmcia slot of the powerbook and not use the same firewire bus for both the audio unit and the drive.
However I'm not sure whether the powerbook makes full use of both at the same time or it somehow shares them. I guess something like irq sharing...
I'm not very good at that so any info will be great.
I'm also using USB 2 hard drive and some other usb 1 devices so virtually every port of the powerbook is used.
Will it change the performance if i seperate the 2 firewire devices or it will just create more sharing issues...?

thanks

Ion

Posted by: lepetitmartien Sat 30 Apr 2005, 13:42

Go for the PCMCIA firewire card, it works.

Cards bring you at least one FW bus more (check the specs)

Posted by: misterharrison Sat 22 Dec 2007, 14:14

I hope no one minds me resurrecting this topic, but I've searched on various forums and can't find the answers I need.

I'm trying to use a bus-powered RME Fireface400 and an externally-powered FW800 HD on a G4 PowerBook.

Problems:

• The RME is selfish and doesn't like sharing the Firewire bus - although there are separate 800 and 400 ports on the PowerBook, they actually share the same bus.
• The FW400 RME pulls the FW800 HD connection down to 400 speed.

So...

I obviously need a PCMCIA Firewire card!

Questions:

• Which device should I run off the PCMCIA card, the interface or the HD? (bearing in mind that the interface is bus-powered)
• Can anyone recommend a PCMCIA card to do this? (Obviously with a FW800 port if I'm connecting the HD to it)

Thanks

Will

Posted by: mortalengines Sun 23 Dec 2007, 07:32

I am looking at the same thing as I am planning on buying a Focusrite Liquid Mix (it too needs its own FW hub). As far as what device should use what input, I don't really know which will work better for you as I haven't heard about one way working better than the other. It may be trial and error at first. I really wanted to let you know that I found some of the PCMCIA card bus FW adapters on Ebay for 20 dollars US that are Mac compatible. Go for it. What the heck, if it doesn't work you've wasted 20 bucks. I am still trying to make sure that I won't get laid off before I buy my Liquid Mix (I work in construction). Right now that is the ONLY thing that keeps me from going forward.


www.myspace.com/mortal_engines