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RE: pcmcia/cardbus vs. firewire



I've just had an experience that may point to the direction of things to
come.  

Two observations/hypotheses:

1 - the demise of PCMCIA
2 - poor mainstream acceptance of Firewire

I just got an MOTU UltraLite (audio digital interface) that didn't work
with the Firewire in the laptop, perhaps either because it didn't like
the 4-pin format (needs 6-pin), but also because MOTU requires either
the TI or the Lucent 1394 chipset, and the laptop used a Ricoh 1394
chipset.

I decided to get a PCMCIA Firewire card, and found out that, to my
surprise, my (also new) laptop didn't have a PCMCIA slot.  It has an
ExpressCard slot, which is not reverse compatible to PCMCIA.  (I also
have to buy a new wireless data card.)

So, I bought an ExpressCard Firewire card that has both 6-pin and 9-pin
800/400 1394 (http://www.siig.com/ViewProduct.aspx?pn=NN-EC2812-S1).

Except for having a hunk of plastic hanging off the side of my laptop, I
have been EXTREMELY happy with it.  ALL of my latency problems have
disappeared (I was using a pretty beefy but single core laptop with USB2
- Tascam 428).

In addition to the conspicuous deprecation of a PCMCIA slot, it's
curious that a $4000 Dell multimedia laptop
(http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1710?c=
us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19) - with 6 USB ports - only has a single, 4-pin 1394
port.

Dave Huffman


-----Original Message-----
From: Krispen Hartung [mailto:khartung@cableone.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 10:51 AM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: pcmcia/cardbus vs. firewire

Well, Rainer sent these figures out as a result of a thread we had on
this:

5. USB 1.x 12Mbps = 1.5MBps
4. FW400      400Mbps =  50MBps
3. USB 2.0      480Mbps =  60MBps
2. FW800      800Mbps = 100MBps
1. PCI/PCMCIA    1.1Gbps = 133MBps

If you are using FW800, then it appears cardbus will not get you that
much 
more speed. But more importantly, Per or Andy?
did the math to suggest that all this speed will not necessarily get
your 
better peformance, given the bandwidth requirements of
mulit-tracking.

Also, it may be the case that audio companies just haven't invested that

much in cardbus solutions (except for Indigo and RME, a few others),
so there are performance issues not related to speed. I've read a few of

them on some audio lists.

Finally, PCMCIA evolved to Cardbus (CardBus are PCMCIA 5.0 or later
(JEIDA 
4.2 or later) 32-bit PCMCIA devices, introduced in 1995) and now we have

ExpressCard.  Interesting article here: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard

The ExpressCard has a maximum throughput of 2.5 Gbit/s, versus CardBus's

shared 1066 Mbit/s bandwidth.

Kris
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Raul Bonell
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 10:33 AM
Subject: OT: pcmcia/cardbus vs. firewire


hi there,

one question.

why if (relating other talks here before) cardbus is faster than
firewire, 
people still wanting to go firewire. do macs have cardbus slots? due to
the 
price when getting the adapter and interface?

i'm suposing here pcmcia=cardbus. am i wrong?

well, not one question at all... ;-)

thanks in advance,
raul.

-- 
The Playing Orchestra: http://www.telefonica.net/web2/tpo
Chain Tape Collective: http://www.ct-collective.com
TPO at myspace: http://www.myspace.com/theplayingorchestra