Firewire Cardbus On A Powerbook G4, Performance issues Options

[kassotis]

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

[misterharrison]

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