firewire expresscard and latency with 8pre

[felixnine]

i'm thinking of buying a new laptop. unfortunately, the one i'm looking at doesn't have onboard firewire, so i figured i'd just be able to get an expresscard firewire interface for it. does anyone have a recommended one to buy? latency is (obviously) unacceptable; is that something i really have to worry about with an expresscard interface?

i just don't get why more laptops don't come with firewire.

[TheRealRoach]

Firewire is sort of getting streamed out of use. It was never really picked up by much more than high-throughput pro-media users such as audio and video. Now USB 2.0 does just as good a job, and USB 3.0 is ready to go with theoretical speeds that will far surpass FW400.

Your firewire card will likely not have any impact on performance, as long as you're adhering to MOTU's recomendations about getting something with a Texas Instrument chipset. In fact, onboard (built-in) firewire ports are generally not recommended no matter what the chipset. I'm not sure that there's necessarily real-world practical truth to this but it's the word on the street.

I personally have never noticed any performance difference regardless of chipset-brand, model, or whether it is onboard, PCI, or PCI-e. There may be theoretical differences in performance, but again, the variance in performance is miniscule compared to the differences in computer processor specs, RAM specs, harddrive specs, Operating system, driver version/interaction and on and on and on.

[felixnine]

right on, thanks for the info. do you know why motu recommends TI chipsets?

[TheRealRoach]

From the MOTU site:

There's an incompatibility between the NEC chip found in some FireWire cards and the MOTU FireWire line of interface.

If the FireWire installer warns you that you're running a FireWire card with the NEC chip, you should replace said card with a card that uses the TI (Texas Instruments) or LSI (formlery Lucent/Agere) chip.

Keyspan, Sonnet, Miglia, and ADS are a few of the many brands using the TI or LSI FireWire chips. Note that not all cards by a given manufacturer use the same chipset, so please check with the manufacturer of the FireWire card before purchasing it to ensure it has a TI or LSI chip. Many combo USB/FireWire cards do not a use TI or LSI chip, so a dedicated FireWire card is recommended.

For additional considerations about FireWire cards when using the Traveler or UltraLite, please see this tech note.


They don't really expand beyond that unfortunately.