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I am constantly hearing about the excellent speed of all of these new Firewire products out there. Anyway I was wondering if the firewire cards required a special bus on your system board, or if one could be entered into the pci slot. I am new to firewire so if this is a stupid question dont flame too much. Also do they make network adaptors to use this high speed card? Ive seen the IEEE 1394 hard drives out there and was thinking of using this as a way to back up my hard drives.
You don't need a special bus to use firewire, you can put a firewire card into a pci socket on your motherboard.
You cannot get nic's that use firewire as far as i'm aware - the hard drives you speak of are external models that use firewire connectivity because of its high bandwidth. If you want a super fast network - you could use a gigabit ethernet nic, but you'd need a gigabit switch to feed it.
As far as Firewire goes you can buy a standard PCI card that plugs in with no problem. You can do networking with itas well through FireNet (a common network setup) technologies just like you could network through USB. It runs at about 10x the speed of USB which makes it really good for data transfer and networking.
What Ive heard makes me believe that firewire has greater speed capabilities than the pci bus would support. Since the pci bus has throughput only up to 264mb/sec and firewire has throughput of up to 400 mb/sec. The pci bus wouldn't be able to deliver the info at the maximum speeds or is there some way around this?Quote:
As far as Firewire goes you can buy a standard PCI card that plugs in with no problem.
Hold on, Back the ship up a bit there captain newbie....
I see you are another one of those people that still type mb in all lower case, can't tell their byes from their bits, and uses them interchangeably.
PCI has a throughput of 256 MB/sec <-MegaBytes
FireWire has a throughput of 400 Mbps <-MegaBits
PCI can handle all the throughput multiple firewire devices could ever throw at it and then some.
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Sorry I must have read that wrong.