Expresscard FW800

I'm trying to find an expresscard FW800 or esata adapter and I don't seem to be able to find any on the web anywhere.
My new MacBook Pro will be arriving soon and I need one of these cards to handle video editing (HDV/HD etc).
Can anyone help? Or point me in the right direction? I live in the UK.

Here is a list of the cards I have found:
Firewire 800:
http://www.cooldrives.com/iefi800exsis.html
eSATA:
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/seritek2sm2e.html
here's a review/benchmark of the eSATA card:
http://www.barefeats.com/hard71.html
check out both and read reviews in the forums because I recall seeing some issues with both.

Similar Messages

Using a expresscard FW800; G-Raid drive unmounts on it's own

I'm using a NitroAV Fw800 dual expresscard to connect my 500gig G-Raid drive that i use for video editing. I have never had a problem with it using Tiger.
Ever since I upgraded to leopard it is behaving strangely.
I mount the drive and all is well, (this is an example of the problem I'm having with it) I used the drive to provide 3.8 gigs of info to burn a disk recently. It burned fine and when it was done the drive just sat there, turned on, mounted for a few minutes and then it unmounts itself.
When it's doing something it behaves fine, when I leave it alone for a bit it unmounts itself and I get the error saying that it has been removed without ejecting it first.
If I connect it via the built in FW400 port, it stays connected and I have no issues. other drive I have are FW400 and they behave perfectly.
I have never had this problem before. what could it be?

I spoke with the company that manufactures the expresscard (NitroAV) again and they said it is a foul up associated with upgrading to Leopard and not installing fresh and reformatting the hard-drive.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to have Apple address this problem?
thanks for any help.
Carlos

USBvsFWvsSATA Ext. Drives - The Comprehensive(?) Guide!

Maybe not the most comprehensive, but I see this topic come up over and over again. Hopefully this will answer pretty much everyone's questions. AFAIK everything here is pretty accurate, but I'm not perfect, so do your own research!
OK, before we begin, you must understand that the fastest any drive will work will be the slowest spot in the chain (generally the platters, or the physical interface). If you put a SATAII drive in a USB 1.1 enclosure, not only will the drive simply crawl, but you have wasted a great deal of money! So, let's look at the specs of interfaces, then the drives, and then put it all together.
These numbers are averages, and sometimes educated guesses. So not all here is set in stone. A lot of the numbers are gleaned from www.storagereview.com - a great site for drive benchmarking, etc.
First we need to understand the difference between burst speed and sustained throughput. Burst is just what it sounds like. Just a quick burst of data. Sustained throughput is what really matters in drives. This is actually how fast data can move to and from the drive continuously. Streaming video, copying of large files, etc. all rely on *sustained throughput*. This is the benchmark that matters, not burst.
Most drive speeds are shown as the actual interface speed (the speed with which data can be moved from the controller & cache to the interface on the PC). This speed is fast because it is all electronic transfer. However, the actual drive speed is slower because the platters, etc. all have moving parts, and are slower than the interface speed. Also, this "extrenal transfer rate" has almost NOTHING to do with the capabilities of the drive itself. It is simply the FASTEST link in the chain (pure electronic transfer), & therefore what the marketing folks like to use. The drives internal characteristics are what limits its performance.
Disk Platters --(STR)--> Cache --(ETR)--> IDE interface on your PC mobo.
Lets look at the external transfer rates (ETR) compared to the real world sustained throughput (STR) rates:
- USB 1.1 - so slow, don't even think about it.
- USB 2.0 - 480Mbps = 52MBps. This is BURST ETR. Sustained Throughput is MUCH slower. According to Storage Review once you take away the overhead of converting data from IDE or SATA to USB, the USB protocol, etc. USB gives you an effective sustained throughput of around 26MBps, or 208mbps. A far cry from 480 burst that USB 2.0 claims. And that is the maximum. Now you need to find a drive that performs as close to that maximum as possible...
- FW400 - 400mbps = 50MBps - this speed, however, is sustained throughput. IOW, even though the numbers are smaller than USB 2.0 (400 vs 480) a FW400 drive is going to be a lot faster. How much faster? Well, not as much as you'd expect. IIRC the actual sustained throughput of a FW400 drive (remember there is overhead) is in the neighborhood of 35MBps, not 50MBps. THis is the speed of actual data streaming from the drive to the PC/laptop, after overhead. 35+MBps.
- FW800 - 800mbps - 100MBps - I don't have any actual numbers for this. If FW400 is doing 35MBps, then I would guess that FW800 is somewhere between 70MBps & 80MBps (if your drive is fast enough to pump data out that quickly!). FW800 would be a little more than twice FW400 (well, theoretically at least) because you only have to subtract the overhead once, not twice. Now, IDE drives, no matter what the interface, are not going to give you sustained throughput this fast, but it does have advantages as we will see with SATA over FW400.
-eSATA - 1.5Gbps = 187.5MBps - In the real world, SATA drives (15k and 10krpm ones no less) will give you somewhere close to 80-90MBps sustained throughput. Not the 187 theoretical limit.
- IDE/ATA/33 = 33MBps or 264mbps - In the real world, sustained throughput from these drives is going to run around the 23-26MBps mark.
- IDE/ATA/66 = 66MBps or 528mbps - In the real world there is almost NO difference in speeds between ATA33 and ATA66 drives. Many times a 7200rpm ATA33 drive can outperform a 5400rpm ATA66 drive. Often times when you see benchmarks showing much better ATA66 performance over ATA33 performance the reason is that the ATA33 drive is a 5400rpm drive, and the ATA66 drive is a 7200rpm drive!
- IDE/ATA/100/133 - There is very little throughput advantage to these either. They do come in faster rpms. In fact the difference is so negligible, that at one point IBM called their ATA100 drives "ATA66+"
SO then, what is the point of ATA100 over ATA33 then? Well if the data that you need is *already in the cache* of your drive, then it will move from the cache to your PC mobo at the ETR speed of 100MBps (in the case of ATA100). This situation is such a small percentage of the requests for data made to a disk, that when you average it out, the results are negligible.
All of this being said, at times it can be a waste to put an ATA100 drive into an ATA33 mobo. For one thing, ATA100 drives are more expensive. For another thing, on those rare occassions where the data you want IS in the drives cache, it can't move it to the PC at 100MBps, it can only do 33MBps.
So, what makes a drive faster? The bottleneck is getting data from the platters to the cache. So, a faster rotational speed will get the data there faster. If you have a 5400rpm ata33 drive, lets say it's getting data to the cache at 20MBps. Now get a 7200rpm version of the same drive, and you may get data at an STR of 26MBps. Both drives are ATA33, and both drives are identical sizes. That 7200rpm ata33 drive can easily be faster than a 5400rpm ata100 disk. Of course different drives have different performance specs... Not all 100GB 5400rpm drives are alike, as we will see at the very end of this post!
OK, so a summary at this point:
Interfaces
=======
USB 2.0 = ~26MBps (real world STR)
FW400 = ~35MBps
FW800 = ~80MBps (educated guess)
eSATA = somewhere in the 100MBps I would guess I have not seen any SATA interface benchmarks, though I have seen SATA drive benchmarks
Drive Interfaces
===========
NOTE: with drives there is a range. The higher speeds in the range are generally the 15krpm and the 10krpm drives, at least in my SATA numbers.
ATA33 = 23-26MBps
ATA66 = 23-26MBps
ATA100 & 133 = 23-26MBps
SATA = ~70-90+MBps
So, what drive and what interface to get? USB? FW400? Expresscard-FW800? Expresscard-eSATA? Well, it depends on what you wanna do, really. For streaming video editing, you need 3.6MBps per stream. Remember there will be additional overhead (possibly) on the drive. If you are streaming 2 video streams, each with 2 audio tracks, the drive has got to look that stuff up and stream it from the drive to your application. Hopefully you have a lot of RAM!
Remember that a 5400rpm desktop drive will be slower than a 5400rpm 2.5 laptop drive because the laptop drive is smaller so the same rpms with less physical space to search means faster access times. ALso remember that a 250Gig desktop drive will be slower than an 80Gig laptop drive. Smaller capacity drives are faster which is why you don't see real data warehouse raid servers running multiple 500Gig drives, but rather multiple 120Gig drives. So a 100Gig 7200rpm IDE drive can easily (again depending on the particular drive) smoke a 300Gig 5400rpm desktop drive, and even it's 7200rpm equivalent.
SO (by interface):
If your external hard drive is going to connect via USB (~26MBps) then you want a drive that can take full advantage of that. If you are just transferring data for backups, or copying files back & forth, then any old IDE drive will be just fine. If you are doing video and want to maximize your performance, you want to use as much of that 26MBps bandwidth as possible. Get a 7200rpm IDE drive. A 5400rpm may suffice (again not all 5400rpm drives are equal as I will point out shortly). SO how fast is a 7200rpm drive via USB going to be as compared to a desktop drive? It will be at least on par with any 5400rpm desktop drive, and possibly on par with many 7200rpm desktop drives. See becnhmarks taken from storagereview.com at the end of this post for a limited laptop<->desktop comparison.
Now, if you want to connect via FW400, you want to maximize that 35+MBps bandwidth, right? What are your options? a 7200rpm IDE drive, or a 5400rpmSATA drive (a 7200rpmSATA drive for FW400 is a complete waste of money at this point). So you can get 26MBps from the 7200rpm IDE (wasting only about 9MBps), or MUCH higher from the SATA. The problem is that even if you are getting say 70MBps from a 2.5" external SATA drive (which would likely have to be a 7200rpm drive), you are still limited by the 35+MBps speed of the FW400 connection. You can spend a lot more money and max out that 35MBps w/ SATA, or get slightly lower performance with a 7200rpm IDE drive. THese days, the SATAs are as cheap and in some cases cheaper than the equivalent sized 7200 IDE drives. However, there are caveats (see below) that may make you think twice about getting that SATA over the 7200rpm IDE! Oh, and 7200rpm IDEs are getting faster STRs all the time.
FW800. Basically the same arguements as with FW400. Here's the thing.... why get the FW800 expresscard unless it's REALLY cheap? For about the same price you can get an eSATA expresscard and get better performance (how much is up for debate). Personally I would not even think about FW800. It would be either USB/FW400 on the lower-end, or eSATA on the higher end. FW800 for IDE drives is a waste. Use the internal FW400 port if you can.
eSATA - well, you have no choice. You HAVE to get a SATA hard drive. SImple!
CAVEATS:
Here's the thing. WIth 2.5" drives, IDE drive can operate off of USB bus power. SATA drives often need an external power source. The USB spec only outputs up to 500 or 600 milliamps of power via USB. This is fine for many SATA drives when it comes to reads & writes. However, many require more power for spinup. The Hitachi low power 5k100 SATA drive requires up to 1 amp (1000 milliamps) of power at spinup. The hitachi rep told me that his drive may work on USB power, but running the drive through it's paces would likely need an external (plug into the wall) power source. This is a low power SATA drive too.
Now, if you are going to plug into the wall ANYWAY, then why not just go ahead and get a 3.5" enclosure? For the same price of a 100GB 2.5" SATA drive, you can get a 300GB 3.5" SATA drive! The 3.5" SATA enclosures are a lot cheaper than the 2.5 ones as well.
IDE drives require less power than SATA and can be powered off of the USB port (2.5" drives only - all desktop drives will require AC power!)
CAVEAT #2:
Do you plan to boot windows off of this drive (using the BootCamp windows install hack that allows you to have a small 5Gig windows partition on your Mac for bootstrapping Windows, and where the rest of the windows files are installed to the external drive)? If this is your goal, then Firewire is NOT an option for you!. Windows will NOT boot off of a firewire drive. It will boot off of a USB drive (with the aforementioned hack), or eSATA (w/o the hack).
==========
CONCLUSION
==========
So, I think the best options boil down to the degree of freedom and mobility that you want. If you want a truly portable drive that is not tethered to a wall outlet, then you MUST use an IDE drive, and not SATA. Given the 26MBps real world STR of IDE, and the similar max STR of USB 2.0, this combo makes the most sense. IF you are using your USB ports for other stuff, you can get a FW400 enclosure, or a USB/FW enclosure. FW/USB combo enclosures run around 50% more in price than USB 2.0 only enclosures (iow, about $10 more). And there is not much use in using FW400 unless you have a 7200rpm IDE drive, AND you can't boot from a FW drive if you wanted that option.
If you don't mind being tethered to a wall, I think the best solution for the money is to get a 3.5" SATA enclosure so you can get a much larger drive for your money. It's your choice whether you want to buy a FW800 or eSATA expresscard (I would pick eSATA - no SATA to FW conversion overhead). If you don't want to spend the $100 or whatever on an expresscard, get an external SATA enclosure that is both SATA to eSATA and SATA to FireWire. Again, booting off of Firewire is not an option (at least not for Windows).
====
P.S.
====
One last point: Not all drives are alike!
Quick and simple point... 2 virtually identical 2.5" 7200rpm drives from different manufacturers can perform very differently.
Take a look at the SR High-end DriveMark2006 scores for the following drives (Higher is better):
Hitachi Travelstar 7k100 (100GB, 2.5", 7200rpm, IDE) = 413
Seagate Momentus 7200.1 (100GB, 2.5", 7200rpm, IDE) = 366
Seagate Momentus 5400.2 (100GB, 2.5", 5400rpm, IDE) = 332
Hitachi Travelstar 5k100 (100GB, 2.5", 5400rpm, IDE) = 326
Western Digital Scorpio WD800VE (80GB, 2.5", 5400rpm, IDE) = 287
What this means is that the Seagate 5400rpm is almost as fast as the Seagate 7200rpm drive, with the Hitachi 5k100 neck & neck! The WD 5400rpm drive, however, is noticably slower.
How does this compare to other drives?
The same test performed on high-end desktop drives (these were the ones that scored the lowest - there were some amazingly fast drives - they are also expensive drives)
Seagate Cheetah 10k.7 Desktop Mode (300GB, 3.5", 10000rpm, Ultra320 SCSI) = 412 (that is SLOWER than the Hitachi travelstar 7k100 IDE drive!!!)
Seagate Cheetah 10k.7 Server Mode (300GB, 3.5", 10000rpm, Ultra320 SCSI) = 410
Hitachi Deskstar 7k400 w/ TCQ (400Gb, 3.5", 7200rpm, SATA) = 392 (Hitachi's own notebook drive beats the SATA in these benchmarks!)
Seagate Savvio 10k.1 Server Mode (74GB, 3.5", Ultra320 SCSI) = 375
Hitachi Ultrastar 10k300 (300GB, 3.5", Ultra320 SCSI) = 369
(look at www.storagereview.com for the bench marks and an explanation of this particular benchmark.)
This means that those IDE notebook drives are pretty fast drives, and can even keep up with some SATA and Ultra320 SCSI desktop/server drives! Unfortunately I could not find STR numbers for the laptop drives on storagereview.com or any other location. If anyone knows of another site, I would love to see the results.
-Brain21
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.7)

So, which FW400 portable drive (brand & model) would
you personally recommend?
Regards,
Neither!
Actually, I am going to be booting Windows from a 5Gig internal (bootcamp) partition and the OS files will reside on the external drive. This limits me to SATA & USB.
I am going to get a USB 2.0 enclosure and get one of those 4 drives mentioned at the end of the article (Hitachi TravelStar 5k100 & 7k100 & the Seagate Momentus 5400 and/or 7200rpm drives). That will be my "mobile" solution.
Then, I'm going to find a SATA enclosure (3.5") that does eSATA and FW. I'll clone my mobile drive onto that (well, at least the windows install). I'll run FW400 until prices for the eSATA cards come down to the $50 range (the cards are already there - well one brand is, but there are no mac drivers for it, just windows... so maybe that cheap one will work for me...)
Don't know what brand & size 3.5 drive I'm gonna get.
As for the enclosures, there is something that I don't know that much about. How much of a difference do the chipsets on these things really make a difference? Oxford is the only chipset that I know by name, but I am going to stay away from those. I saw a recording studio lose thousands of dollars worth of recorded time (that they had to refund) because the oxford chipset on their external HDD died and took the drive with it. When I took it to a data recovery specialist friend of mine and told him what happened his first question was "Oxford chipset?" I'm sure that they are much improved now over 2 years ago, but I don't want to take any chances.
Brain21

New McBkPro: Best Firewire audio + HD setup?

I am thinking about getting a new MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo notebook instead of upgrading my PowerMac to a Mac Pro desktop. I have a M-Audio Firewire Solo interface and a Lacie external FW800 hard drive for recording audio. I do pop music with many layered vocals with FX with a lot (12-20+) vocal audio track -- so the FW bus will be handling many audio tracks as well as recording the "next" audio track.
Right now I have the interface on the FW400 jack and the HD on the FW 800 jack on the PowerMac. I thought I read that on the MacBook Pro notebooks all the FW jacks are on the same bus. I am just setting up the external FW HD so I have not "stress tested" it while using the FW interface (also new) on the PowerMac at the same time.
Are all the FW jacks on the same bus on the Intel Mac Pro? The MacBook Pro?
Will this create any thruput or extra latency issues?
What would be the best way to set up a MacBook Pro as a Logic Pro machine? Do I need to add an ExpressCard FW800?
Any advice would be appreciated. My laptop is ancient (PB 12" 867 mhz) and my desktop is a couple years old. Would be great is I could consolidate on one machince - a laptop - and still have the horsepower to do complex multitracking vocal layering with low latency just on a notebook. The new Core 2 duos sound amazing.
Sorry to rattle on - summary question --
What would be the best way to set up a new MacBook Pro with a FW audio interface and FW external drive -- if that is practical for very complex multi-track audio?
John Dee

I have noticed zero difference in latency with my USB interface (Lexicon Omega) versus my MOTU 828mkII. None at all. In fact, the USB interface has worked so well for me, that I'm trying to find a higher quality 2-4 input USB interface, but can't find any really. It's nice to have the fw buss all for my drive. I don't like the cards sticking out the slot, so I have never tried a pc/express card myself.
USB interfaces get beatup on the forums. I suspect it to be more that companies keep the USB as "cheap" low end units, and use FW for their more expensive units...half of it is marketing I think. But, I've had a few USB, and they have all worked fine, with no more or less latency.
The Omega has 6 analog ins, plus midi, 4 at a time recording, and 2 back from the mac, and one USB buss is fine. I can't use it on a hub to share USB bandwidth, but that's why 2 USB ports on the left back side of the new macbook pro's is so cool. Those are the only 2 things I need plugged in to my system - one for the Omega, one for a USB hub with everything else. Then when I need my FW800 drive, it goes on the right port, and everything is happy.
I have read about people having no problems with HDs and FW interfaces on the same buss, even daisy chaining one to the other...it just doesn't seem to work for me on any mac I own (5 macs!).

WD MyBook hangs up Finder

Tricky one here.
I have been trying to backup my audio recording drive (Glyph GT050Q 250GB) to a WD MyBook Pro drive (250GB, formatted FAT32 to use with Windows and OS X).
The audio drive is connected via ExpressCard - FW800.
The backup (WD MyBook Pro) is connected via the MacBook Pro's FW800 port.
When I try to copy data from audio to backup, things start ok and then start to slow down. Activity Monitor shows Finder using between 1% and 4% CPU at first, increasing to well over 100%. This happens using drag and drop and also Retrospect Express.
After repairing disk permissions on my internal drive, I can sometimes get it working properly, but then it seems to happen all over again.
I've reformatted the WD backup to HFS+ as an experiment. That seems to work better, but I'm still seeing the transfer rate slow down to well below optimal.
All suggestions welcome
17" MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Hi,
I cannot offer advice but maybe my own bad experienves with a WD MyBook Pro (500GB) are related?:
My drive is connected via Firewire800 (builtin port of my MPB 2.33). everytime the MBP wakes up on sleep the drive is too slow responding and I get an error-message ("device disconnected improperly"). I have been able to confirm this is a bug with driver/firmware (End of March 2007) but so far no update has appeared. To me it seems though the hardware is fine (and good looking too) and cheap, the drivers/firmware are buggy and flawed.
Greetings,
Rolf

External drive connected to FW800 ExpressCard - bootable?

I have a 2.0 GHz Core [1] Duo MacBook Pro with no built-in Firewire 800, and wish to use an external boot drive at faster-than-FW400 speeds. Trying eSATA seems to be an endless nightmare right now, but what about FW800? If I connected a FireWire 800 ExpressCard, could I connect my external boot drive to that?
The card I was looking at is the Apiotek EC-0002B, but I have no problem using a different brand if that card is not bootable and another is. The drive enclosure would be one of the quad-format SATA boxes from OWC.

Hmm. Well, Apiotek is an unreachable Taiwanese company, Apple seems to think that an ExpressCard that requires no drivers would be bootable, and OWC thinks no ExpressCard is bootable. And I don't really feel like dropping $70 shipped/taxed on an experiment.
Is there anybody on this forum who's tried booting a MacBook Pro from a drive connected through some ExpressCard interface? There has to be someone. It seems like such a straightforward thing to try, but a forum search for "expresscard AND bootable" suggests otherwise. Odd.
This makes me pine for my dear departed G4. If I wanted to add a new, fully functional interface, I slapped in a card. Ah, the days when expandable Macs didn't start at $2500.
Sonnet sells a FW800 card that looks to be the same card with their branding on it. Maybe I'll call them on Monday.

Looking for a bootable FW800 ExpressCard

I'm considering adding a FW800 Expresscard to my MacBook Pro 3,1. I was wondering if a Firewire port added via Expresscard would be recognized by the EFI and be able to be used to boot off of, like with the internal Firewire ports. If so, are there some chipset Firewire cards that will be recognized and some that won't? And, if so, can anyone recommend any particular compatible cards?
Thanks

JoeyR wrote:
Unfortunately, devices connected via the express slot are not recognized by the EFI during boot.
*NOT TURE!* My JMicron based SATA IS bootable. I don't have a fw800 card, but OWC will tell you for sure or not. I would contact them! http://eshop.macsales.com/Service/index.cfm
Apple wrote the specs for firewire. If your Mac won't boot from these cards, that would be news to me.

Fireface 800 into MBP 400 port expresscard 34 fw800 dual port

i am getting a fireface 800 finally. thanks wife, thanks band paying half.
okay. on my MBP i have a fw 400 port ( plug RME in here ). then i was going to use my lacie fw 800 drive via a belkin expresscard dual port fw800 expansion bus.
what do you guys think about this? can i get 8 tracks at one time at say 48k with this setup?

cool. i am going to get the dual card and setup a fw800 raid 0 when i get the money, i am trying to use what i have. i really hope that i can get 8 at a time with this. it is crucial to my project.

Any opinions on this FW800 Expresscard? (it's not by NitroAV or Akumen)

I haven't heard of these guys but I have the link to their site. Please check it out and let me know what you think...
http://www.cooldrives.com/iefi800exsis.html
MBP (2.0Ghz), 2GB RAM (Kingston) Mac OS X (10.4.6) Also running WinXP Pro on MBP...

I can't opine re the adapter, but I have bought numerous HD enclosures from them which were of excellent quality and their service was just as good. I do recommend Coolgear.
Webb

What Is, And Why do I need it: ExpressCard/34 Slot?

In the very near future I will be obtaining a 17" MBP. That's just savvy, except for one minor detail. What is an ExpressCard/34 slot, why do I need one, why would it have been included in this particular size MBP and what can I shove in there?

The expresscard slot is for expansion purposes. it allows a low cost esata connection to your macbook pro. you can plug an esata adapter in and then use one of many external esata enclosures. "apiotek ec-0003d" costs about 40 bucks and will let you add 2 non-bootable external esata enclosures then can run at 3Gbps. fw800 runs at 800Mbps..
"OWC esatat sata expressCard/34Adapter" bootable 1 esata adapter is 19 bucks it will let you add 1 esata enclosure at speeds up to 3Gbps.
so if you get the non bootable one you can add 2 enclosures like "sans digital towerStor Ts2ct". that would be up to 4Tb for each one total of 8tb far faster then fire wire. if you get the bootable 1 esata type you could add 1 external at 4tb. this lets you macbook pro boot from a 4tb external at internal speeds. kind of gives you the ability to make you laptop a real desk top when you want it to be that. Then back to a real lap top by unplugging it. Not trying to sell any of the above items I just happen to use them.
This option was pulled from iMac's a real drag as iMacs could use more fast enclosures.

Recommended ExpressCards for new 17" MBP for video editing

Ok, so after sitting on the fence for months I had to buy the new 17" MBP. I just couldn't wait any longer and my trusty PB G4 is getting slow.
After reading the enormous amounts of posts I can see why people are so upset about losing the ExpressCard slot in the 15" models.
But, for the 17" models does anyone have any good suggestions of Expresscards? And what is the optimum set-up I should go for?
I am an Avid and Final Cut editor using a 4-pin Firewire Sony DVCAM deck and two Western Digital External Drives daisy-chained together.
Would love some advice.
thanks!

The Sony DVCAM is FW400 (aka iLink, aka IEEE1394a), so a 4-pin-to-6-pin or -to-9-pin cable will do. I'd get the 4-pin-to-9-pin (FW800 is fully backward compatible with FW400) so you can connect directly to the MBP's FW800 port, if needed. You can just get a FW800 ExpressCard, since it's backward compatible.
I'd recommend this one:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fw800expresscard34.html

FW800 to eSATA - performance jump likely to be worthwhile?

Hi there.
I currently use two external drives with my MBP and have just got back into using FCP for video editing. I've always used both drives with their respective FW800 ports although one of the drives (a WD MyBook Studio II) has an eSATA port that I've never utilised.
I'm wondering whether it's worth my while buying an Expresscard/34 eSATA adaptor to enable me to use the WD drive with eSATA but would like to know if I'm likely to see a decent jump in performance: if the increase is marginal I'd stick with FW800.
TIA.

Be extremely careful with expresscard adapters and MacBook Pros. I have a MacBook Pro 2007 and three different eSATA expresscard adapters:
OWC Slim ExpressCard to eSATA Adapter. T
APIOTEK EXTREME Dual eSATA SATA I/II Express Card 34 Adapter with the latest Silicon Image 3132 Drivers
OWC ExpressCard/34 eSATA SATA I/II ExpressCard/34 Adapter
None of these work on my MacBook Pro 2009. The card is recognized, the hard drive mounts, and reads from it. However after writing for 5-10 minutes. The hard drive is corrupted and I have te re-nitialize the hard drive.
Exact same Mac OS 10.6.7, same card and three different hard drives enclosures (OWC RAID and non-RAID, and Hitachi): No problem on my MacBook Pro 2007. The performance boost is incredible and really worth it, if it was reliable on your MacBook Pro. Make sure you extensively test. I lost a lot of data thinking this was going to work fine.
There are many notes in xlr8yourmac about hard drive file corruption.
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/OSXeSATA_PMreports.html
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/express34cardreports.html#storytop
There are also several notes on macintouch
I have talked with Apple and they are unaware of these issues.
So be very careful when using expresscard adapters and depend them to be reliable with hard drives. I have given up and use Firewire 800. Unfortunately, Apple has not taken the time to debug this and admit they have a problem.

FW400 vs. Express card FW800? For Pro Tools?

Has anyone read anything at all about spec comparisons for sustained throughput on FW800 thru an Express Card? Will it end up being much faster than the stock FW400 connection?
If anyone has seen any articles, etc. I'm more than interested. I'd like to make sure that I don't blow a chunk of $$ on a 400 drive if the 800/Express card will give me more digital tracks of audio. I'll be limited to 48 tracks in Pro Tools anyway either way. Just don't have a lot of experience with the FW drives. Was running 7,200 SATA on the old PC.

I used to use this:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10511
With:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10482
On my D*ll laptop (MBP on order now though and i have to say the difference between FW800 and both FW400 and USB2.0 was quite noticeable when rendering video to it (using Premiere Pro 1.5) So i would say that if you can afford it... do it, it'll probably pay for itself quite quickly if you're a professional user.
Or if you want to go hardcore..
Get this:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vydeo-Announces-Dual-Port-eSATA-ExpressCard-34-Fo r-MacBook-Pro-21050.shtml
and use it with this:
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10490
Should cover you for pretty much everything for a while to come

MacBookPro vs PowerBook Capturing Working w/HDV - CardBus vs no ExpressCard

I have seen the benchmarks and the posts here, and it is clear, but for the issues below, I should be getting a MacBook Pro now that my older PowerBook has run into issues. Once footage is captured it seems to be a no-brainer (This thread http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2122030&#2122030 touched on what I am asking, but that was from a couple months back and did not know if there is newer info.)
But the rules of (1) do not send Camera through same Bus as drives and (2) do not capture to system drive really is holding me back and do not know if I should be as concerned as I am.
I plan on capturing HDV to make sure there are back up of tapes on site in the event something happens during travel to the tapes (airport security/lost tapes, etc.) and also will be doing edits and DVD SP work that will have to be turned around very quickly when I get back to my G5 tower to meet deadlines
In the past I use a CardBus with FW800 or another CardBus with SATA for the drives and use the FW in on the computer for the camera.
Since the ExpressCards are not here (the one FW800 is out of stock) and I have to make a decision now (I will be travelling before ExpressCards come back in) I was wondering if someone has worked with HDV recently without an ExpressCard on a MacBook Pro
I am leaning towards getting a 17" PowerBook because of the capture issues (and hold off on Intel Chips then for awhile) and that the machine may be more "stable" as oppossed to the newer Intel setups, but was hoping that perhaps the SATA internal drives on the MacBook Pro or the FW ports have changed the rules somehow (though looking at the threads that the MacBook Pro FW may have power issues?) Plug the camera into a FW Dive then the drive to the computer? (Saw some people had success with this)
Thanks for any new insight to the issues

I'd be looking at the intel MBP... It's a lot more machine, and is definately the future of the platform...if you have issues looping the signal through a firewire drive (I've never had the problem using Granite Digital or Weibetech or G-Raid drives FWIW), then I'm quite sure you could capture to the internal, then move the media... heck folks have done this with PowerBooks so the faster SATA's in the MBPs should do the job just fine.
http://www.supergooddeal.com/XterasysExpressCard_1394b_Host_Adapterp/e94b.htm has an 800 adapter in stock, so if you ran into a problem with a MBP, an 800 drive should do the trick, attached to this adapter.
Jerry

Anyone successfuly using ExpressCard on Vista?

It seems like either the Bootcamp drivers lack support for the ExpressCard slot on Vista or there is a bug in EFI.
Trying to use an ExpressCard in Vista results in Windows telling me "No free resources".
Does anyone around here successfuly use an ExpressCard on Vista?

Most of the ExpressCards I was thinking of were eSATA from Sonnet, Firmtek and others, though there have been FW800 as well in the past - and we know how poorly FW800 can be on Windows.
And for eSATA - and Express is just another PCI Express subset - 3rd party drivers are a must and you don't want Microsoft's, same as with video drivers.
When you mentioned ExpressCard without more detail, it helps to specify as the more info the better... but I would still look at Device Manager or OS X System Profile and find out more about what you are using.
Mac devices need to be mac compatible. PC cards for FW and eSATA - unless they state Mac support - shame as Adaptec and others have some PC only cards that would be nice.
Check out one site that has a wealth of information on Mac hardware like:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems
PCI, ExpressCard, hard drive upgrades and more.

Expresscard FW800

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