From what I have read, firewire add-in cards can be very troublesome. So, does anyone have experience with SIIG 1394b PCI cards? And what about the SanDisk Firewire 800 CF Reader or Lexar FW 800 CF reader?

Thanks

From what I have read, firewire add-in cards can be very troublesome. So, does anyone have experience with SIIG 1394b PCI cards? And what about the SanDisk Firewire 800 CF Reader or Lexar FW 800 CF reader?

Thanks

Hi Steve, I've bought a SIIG card before - unfortunately the Avid NLE we were using didn't like it so we had to swap it out.

We also use the Lexar FW800 CF readers. They are good - it's nice that they are stackable. I've had 4 readers stacked up which is great for 'fire and forget' loading of lots of cards. One caveat - the card ejection mechanism is quite stiff so you really have to push them home well when inserting cards (it's easy to not quite insert them properly).
Speeds are good - 40MB/s from memory on a single reader and depending on your host system you can stack two and get 80MB/s before you start to saturate the Firewire bus.

I did a bunch of testing on various card reader and HD combos which I'll try to post when I'm in the office.

Hope that helps.

Dave

Hi Steve,
I have been using four Lexar FW800 CF readers they are good and have been trouble free.

I'm using the Lexar too and no problems.
However when I eject the card from the Finder, I unplug the FW from the socket before extracting the card.
Rafael

I am using a Sandisk FW800 reader...no problems.