Karaoke Forums

Maybe Eben can help.....

I'm looking at adding a PCI card to accept Firewire for external drive vice using USB 2.0 for higher transfer speeds offered by Firewire, but I'm concerned with PCI bus speed being a bottleneck.

They have 32bit and 64bit PCI Firewire cards.....How do I know if the 64 bit cards will work?

This is my motherboard and CPU:  Gigabyte 8KVM800M rev 2 board
( http://america.giga-byte.com/FileList/M ... m_2x_e.pdf ), with AMD 64 3400 CPU

System BIOS will allow me to adjust PCI bus speed, but says it is dependant on CPU speed.....Haven't fooled with it just using BIOS defaults right now.

Who can advise?

I do shows with 2.0 usb In fact I have accessed the hard drive in the system comp to the laptop using lan wireless peer to peer with no problems...and can record 3tracks .

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Nope, I want firewire!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wanna burn rubber!

I'm also concerned with when I upgrade my mixer and other outboard stuff that uses Firewire now a days

I see Eben lurking...maybe he will speak up

Ok, here are the numbers. If you are using Firewire 1.0, the bandwidth is 400 Mbits per second. If you are using Firewire 2.0, it's 800 Mbits per second. The 32 bit, 33Mhz PCI bus bandwidth is 127MBytes per second or just over 1 Gbits per second. However, that bandwidth is shared between all the devices on the PCI bus. Using 64bit just adds to the bandwidth by adding 32 bits more. USB-2 is whole another interface at 480Mbits per second, slightly faster than Firewire but they are more likely shared between multiple devices.

You probably won't find 64 bit Firewire 1.0 PCI cards so you are limited to about 1 Gbits per second bandwidth. So, it all depends on what you put on your PCI bus. I would assume that you are using AGP for your graphics card. That is most bandwidth hogging device on your system. So, if you don't have anything else on your PCI but, you have nothing to worry about. If you have things like Modem, not much strain on PCI bus. If you have sound card, should be ok, they don't take that much bandwidth.

I would avoid USB-2 drives if you want performance since it's shared bandwidth. If you get Firewire, see if you can get Firewire 2.0 card. They are not much more expensive and they are downward compatible with Firewire 1.0 devices, just connectors are different. Look around to see if there are reasonable Firewire 2.0 based drives. I think you will see the difference in performance, depends on if you want to spend the extra cash for it.

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I just knew you would pop in to help.....

My AGP card is a ATI 9200 all in wonder. I got it slowed down to minimum to preserve bandwidth cause karaoke graphics ain't like games....My sound card is a PCI based Delta 44, so I want to make sure it has sufficient bus share....

The different Firewire cards I've looked at offer 32 or 64 bits...the 64's are extremely fast and are also backwards compatable to 32......I don't care about cost, just want it compatable with future upgrades and not have any bottlenecks if possible.

If you are sharing only with sound card, you shouldn't have to worry about the bandwidth. Just get a Firewire 2.0, 64 bit card and you should be set. Just shop around for Firewire 2.0 based case or drive system and you can't go any faster than that.

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 :dancin:  :D

Eben is DA MAN!

Hey Keith. I looked again at your motherboard and it seem it does not have 64 bit PCI slot. Sorry for not noticing it earlier. You are stuck with 32bit PCI cards. Just get 32 bit PCI, Firewire 2.0 card and you should be ok with it, even with audio card sharing.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

I've never noticed ONE bit of slowage using THREE usb 2.0 devices. Heck, I ran a show one time using an older 1.1 hub!! I wasn't COMFORTABLE with that, but it DID work.

Yep, I agree with you. You don't NEED all that speed, but then we are talking about Keith here. He's all or nothing man.  LMAO He just wanted the fastest possible combination.

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I have followed with interest the usb vs firewire controversy on other forums since 2.0 came out.. Without expounding here do a search on HR "usb vs firewire"....In fact a new thread today has been started again....

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USB 2.0 vs. FireWire
By Roman Shelepov

The peripheral USB 2.0 bus appeared yet last year. Unfortunately, Intel didn't integrate it in its new chipsets, and thus, prevented its popularization. NEC, however, released a single-chip solution for expansion cards with the USB 2.0 support.

And some mainboard manufacturers turned to those chips to integrate USB 2.0 in their boards. Unfortunately, there were too few such mainboards on the market; and it turned out that there were much more devices able to work with the USB 2.0 bus than the controllers.

The odd policy of Intel put the USB 2.0 into the same conditions as the FireWire was in. The FireWire bus is mainly supported via expansion cards. And there are not many mainboards with the integrated FireWire bus. Besides, expansion cards of both buses cost similar today.

So, the market is involved into a direct competition of these two buses.

Their technical characteristics are very close, though each has its own peculiarities.
USB 2.0

  1. 1.5 Mbit/s 12Mbit/s 480Mbit/s supported.
  2. USB controller is required to control the bus and data transfer.
  3. Cable up to 5 m.
  4. Up to 127 devices supported.
  5. Power supply to external devices is 500 mA/5V (max).
  6. Full compatibility with USB 1.1 devices.

FireWire (IEEE1394)

  1. 100 Mbit/s 200Mbit/s 400Mbit/s supported.
  2. Works without control, devices communicate peer-to-peer.
  3. Cable up to 4.5 m.
  4. Up to 63 devices supported.
  5. Power supply to external devices is 1.25A/12V (max.).
  6. The only computer bus used in digital video cameras.

Each bus its advantages and disadvantages. The maximum speeds are almost equal. And each bus has already occupied a certain market niche.

Today I want to compare USB 2.0 and FireWire with regard to storage devices. The devices I took are external cases for hard drives from Datatek.

Hard drives are the fastest data storage devices, and their operation via a peripheral bus is of the most interest.

Some huge companies have already released similar cases for hard drives, but they sell such cases only together with the drives. And the price turns out to be higher than if I'd buy a similar Taiwanese case and a hard drive separately.

When Nikon was still using scscii for their scanners it took 20 minutes for one hi res scan.  I was doing tech support when they shifted to firewire and we worked with the initial bugs with all systems including those who were trying to use (shudder ME)  With cameras using usb1.1 ME totally crashed with more than one usb device....I forget what the firewire scan time was but it was alot less than 20 min...

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Yep, Eben is correct...I gotta go with firewire 32 bit.

I spent the night at work surfing and reading up on Firewire/USB and in particular the buses associated with my motherboard/chipset/CPU combo.

I'm going to go ahead and get a SIIG 800/400 3 port 1394a/b firewire PCI card....It's backwards compatable with my PCI 2.2 motherboard. It will offer great speed AND it will work extremely well with my video camera which has embedded Firewire support.

The external hard drive I selected is a western digital 300GB 7200 RPM that has 1394a, 1394b and USB connections all for $169 with a 3 year full replacement warranty and a really comprehensive software package and all the cables and adapters included.

The whole shebang is only $221 from Newegg.

My head hurts

For best drive performance use internal SATA hard drives. It will also save you some $$.

I would only use externals as a backup when using a tower or rack mount.

I already have two new internals....a 320 and a 160.....I wanted an external setup that was as fast as my internal ones....The Firewire rig looks like it will work.

I currently have 8 internal hard dives in my tower pc.

Ignoring all of the specs I find standard firewire to be a bit slower than usb 2.0. I have 2  - 500 gig Maxtor One touch drives. They seem to have no issues using both of them at the same time.

What motherboard and pci controllers are you using?