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PCMCIA and ExpressCard 54 - Are they interchangeable? (Adding firewire to laptop)

I'm trying to add firewire capabilities to my laptop. I have an ExpressCard 54 slot, but I am having trouble finding a Firewire card for that. I have found several PCMCIA cards, though. They look similar in size, so I wasn't sure if they were interchangeable.

If they aren't, what can you recommend as an alternative?

The device 'Microsoft DV Camera and VCR' could not be opened

I trying capture video from DV camera into computer with firewire cable. When I select "Capture Video", and then check DV, "Sony Video Capture 6.0" pop-up this error:

The device 'Microsoft DV Camera and VCR' could not be opened

I use Sony Vegas Pro 8.0 and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. I tried many ways and they was not successful. Camera "Canon MV750i".

Why do my speakers get distorted randomly on Windows 7?

I have a studio monitor setup. I have 2 KRK 6's and a Focusrite Firewire Pro 24.

Every few hours my speakers sound distorted and my solution has been go to sound levels > Properties of Saffire Audio Device > Advanced > Default Format > Toggle to 16 bit then back to 24bit.

Why does it screw up every few hours? Sometimes one speaker doesn't output too and this same process resets it but that's more rare. Is this a OS issue or Focusrite Driver Issue?

USB vs. FireWire for external hard drives

For external hard drives in this question, I'm referring to traditional HDDs; the kind with spinning metal inside of them (no RAM or flash-based super-high-performance hardware):

Is there a significant speed difference between USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 for external HDDs? And, while we're here, eSATA and FireWire 800? Sure you can just google the bus speed numbers, but can traditional HDDs even keep up with any of them?

Speed comparison between USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and SATA and Firewire

Which external connection has the highest data throughput with respect to the headers used? I would appreciate a slowest to fastest list including USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSata considering bandwidth that is consumed by command and control (reducing the data bandwidth availability).

x64 Windows 7 won't recognize my Sony DV cam DCR-TRV330 through Firewire

I'm having issues using my Sony DV cam DCR-330 and windows 7 ultimate 64bit. I connect the DV Cam as I do it in another pcs (works flawless in windows windows xp 32 bit and another notebook with the same specs than mine but using windows vista x86) but windows doesn't get any "New hardware" in device manager

Is anyone having the same issue than I?

Can I put a Solid State Drive (SSD) in my iMac 11,1 in addition to existing drive?

I have a new iMac 27" (iMac11,1) with 1TB SATA drive.

Is it possible to install a solid-state drive (SSD) into my iMac in addition to the existing SATA drive and use the SSD for startup? I do not want to replace the optical drive.

Alternatively, are there external SSD drives I could use as a startup drive via FireWire 800? Would there be any performance hit for this?

Converting Firewire to USB 3 - is it theoretically possible?

I am in the process of buying a new laptop for video capture / editing, and it's proving difficult to find one at a decent price / spec that includes Expresscard for Firewire connectivity (which I really need). It does seem like Expresscard is on the way out based on what I've seen recently.

Since the assumption seems to be that USB 3.0 is the heir apparent to Expresscard I was wondering what people's thoughts were on whether it should be possible to convert a Firewire input to USB 3.0. There don't seem to be any devices around at the moment that do this but is this because USB 3.0 is still in its infancy or because it's not practical / possible?

How to Connect Firewire Camcorder to Laptop without firewire port

I Have a Sony Camcorder w/ a 4-pin firewire output. I have HP laptop I want to use it with, but the laptop, does not have a firewire port, just VGA, HDMI, USB, ESATA, Ethernet, and Modem. In addition, It doesn't have a PC Card slot for adding a Firewire card. Googling for "Firewire to USB adapter" returns a lot of hits, but no product that seems to do what I want. I assume I need a USB dongle that gives a firewire port and has drivers so that the PC sees it as a regular firewire port. Thanks for any recommendations

Daisy-Chained firewire drives

I want to daisy-chain a couple of fw800 drives to my mac and sync data between them. If possible I would like to run software raid 1 on them. So I am looking for input around the following questions:

How is the performance when copying between two chained firewire drives? (Copying between usb drives is awful)

Are there any caveats to this approach? Is it better to use something like a firewire hub?

Is it possible to run RAID on a setup like this?

Can Windows 8 boot from FireWire?

I read many times Windows 7 is unable to boot from an external FireWire drive but I wonder if Windows 8 is able to do so.

I need to run Windows on my Mac but only very few times so my idea was to move it all to an external drive. I have one of the first Intel Macs so running Windows in a virtual machine is not really fun. The performance is just too poor.

Adding a Boot Camp partition to my internal drive is also not possible at the moment.

Programs keep waiting for external disk to spin up - how to ignore disk?

Like many Mac users I have an external Firewire disk hooked up to my Mac to be used by Time Machine. This works very well, backup-wise.

The problem is that very often when I use a Mac application and try to open a file, the file selection dialogue window hangs until the external disk has spun up. I never ever want to open a file on the external disk. Sometimes this happens even when I just want to save a file I already saved (i.e. type something and press meta-s).

Is there anything I can do about this?

Would firewire networking be better than 100Megabit ethernet?

My office network has a fully switched 1000Megabit ethernet network. I have an Apple iMac with a Gigabit NIC and FireWire, and a Compaq laptop with a 100Megabit NIC and a 4-pin FireWire interface. Accessing my office's shared drives using my laptop is (obviously) much slower using my laptop than my iMac. Would I see a noticible performance boost if I enabled Internet Connection Sharing on my iMac and shared the private ethernet network from my iMac with my laptop over FireWire? FireWire is 480400Mbit/sec, right? So would I see roughly 4x speed improvement with such a setup?

EDIT: OK. Having set this up I find that performance is actually worse when copying a file from a server on our ethernet network to my laptop, when my laptop is connected to my iMac using FireWire. I suspect this is because of NAT on my iMac slowing things down?

I got about 5.9 MB/sec when copying a 100Meg file over 100Megabit ethernet, and only 3.6 MB/sec when copying the same file using firewire <-> iMac <-> ethernet. But when going between the iMac and the laptop using FireWire I get 11 MB/sec! So it must be NAT slowing things down then, huh?

firewire emulation for virtual machines

As is well known by people that have the joy of having a FireWire professional audio interface, virtual machines (VirtualBox, VmWare, etc.) cannot access FireWire devices.

I'm wondering if there are ongoing projects to support firewire emulation over network bridges (tun or tap devices) so that these connections can be provided to virtual machines?

Best performance for small files on external drive?

Which bus has the best read/write performance for small files when used with an external drive? I'd guess eSATA, but the MacBook Pro in question lacks an ExpressCard slot. So it comes down to either USB2 or FireWire 800.

The reason I'm asking is because I want to run Ubuntu Server virtualized (through VirtualBox) on an external hard drive. I'll only use it for web development (Apache, MySQL, PHP) so the reads/writes should mainly be of smaller files.

Thanks!