Firewire Card
With lots of data going in and out of the home PC, it’s no wonder that there are lots of ways to transfer data. There’s WiFi, Bluetooth, LAN cables, USB and Firewire. So far, still one of the fastest way for the computer to communicate with any device is through the Firewire port.
Unfortunately, not all of the older PCs, and some notebooks don’t have a Firewire port. Jointly developed by Apple and Sony, the Firewire port, protocol and specifications was designed to for high-bandwidth transfer between devices. Besides the speed, one other feature is the ability to daisy-chain devices without any switch, toggle or terminator. Another high bandwidth interface, the SCSI (short for “small computer system interface”) requires that the last device have a terminator. Compared to a SCSI which, depending on the type of SCSI can daisy chain up to 16 devices, Firewire connections allow up to 63 devices connected to one root port.
As an interface, the latest specifications for USB is roughly the same as that of a Firewire interface. However, the similarities stop there. Because the USB typically is a shared bus, the sustained transfer is significantly slower than that of a Firewire. Amongh other things, Firewire devices can communicate with one another without a need for a host. That means that a camera can download to a DVD writer without any need to connect to a computer. Besides that, even if all the devices were connected to a computer, if there is no need to pass data to the computer, then the data goes directly to the target device.
In terms of video transfer from a digital camera to the computer, full DV video is passed through a Firewire connection. And even though the camera can transfer data via a USB port, the constraints on that port forces the video transfer to use lower quality video.
For home use, besides video transfers and external hard disks, a Firewire interface can also be used for a LAN connection. Windows XP has a wizard which helps to set this up. For the Mac on OS X, this is even easier to do.
Firewire ports come in 4-pin (unpowered) and 6-pin (powered) interfaces. The additional two pins feed power to the device.
There are Firewire cards which available on the market. Some have up to four ports, and others are a combo of two Firewire ports with another two USB ports included. Firewire cards typically have all external ports, although there are some which have internal ports.
Prices for firewire cards start at around US$15.