Support |
Cool, David. I will try the ExpressCard too. My ThinkPad has both a cardbus and ExpressCard slot. I didn't know they had FW adaptors for those yet? Amazing. I too had problems with a Cardbus/FW adpator I bought several months ago, to try out a FW audio interface. I had a IRQ conflict. However, someone else on this list here had success with another cardbus/FW adpator made by Adaptec...so, I bought that yesterday and will try it with my ThinkPad once I get the RME FW400. But I'd love to use a new ExpressCard adaptor. Kris ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2007 12:24 PM Subject: 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