Cardbus and 15" Powerbook

Is it best to run your external firewire drive through a cardbus rather than the internal firewire port? I have seen many doing this and was wondering what the benefits would be. I was also wondering if the cardbus should have some form of power supply. Several of the cardbus suppliers seem to be selling a power supply for their device. Thanks , Bruce

The cardbus Firewire option is a must when you use your Powerbook with a device like the AJA IO (which uses the Firewire port to transfer really high data rate video) and you want to use other Firewire 400 or 800 devices. The IO simply needs the whole Firewire bus for itself. For DV/DV50/DVCPRO HD/HDV video over Firewire is not necessary. Even DVCPRO HD, which is the most demanding of those, only uses one fourth of the Firewire bus bandwidth. It could have some advantages if you want to use external hard drives and not daisy-chain the devices, for maximum Hard disk transfer speeds. But it's not really a requirement.



Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires - Argentina
www.adolforozenfeld.com

Thank You for the speedy and informative response Adolfo. All the best, Bruce

Bruce,
True. An cardbus adaptor will vastly improve your system stability if you work with unsupported FireWire drives.

Best,
Kevin Monahan
Author, "Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro"
Last Chance to Sign Up for My FCP FX Seminar, coming to LA this Weekend!