Does anyone even make one of these??

[mightyt]

I was contemplating peripheral connectivity to my HTPC and my desire to use PCI slots for things like tuners, etc ... and since I will probably buy a fanless graphics card I'll probably even lose a slot to a protruding heatsync. Anyway, today I have a PCI Firewire card installed.

I know that there are all kinds of converter / adapters out there ... SCSI to USB, PS2 to USB, Parallel to USB, Serial to USB ...

Now, Firewire being 400mb/s and USB2 being 480mb/s I was wondering where I could find a Firewire to USB converter / adapter. Throughput should not be an issue ...

Also, since most every box comes with USB2 and few come with 1394, this would be a very usable solution for flexible portability and not require an internal PCI or PCMCA adapter / slot to add Firewire.

What do ya think? Anyone ever hear of this ... Shouldn’t it be possible?

Thanks, T.

[Wheemer]

I've never seen one... What is it that you are connecting to the firewire port?

[mightyt]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

I've never seen one... What is it that you are connecting to the firewire port?

External HD's and Camcorder ...

[korben_dallas]

No, but there are USB 2.0 + Firewire PCI cards, with several USB & Firewire ports on the same card.

[mightyt]

Originally Posted by korben_dallas

No, but there are USB 2.0 + Firewire PCI cards, with several USB & Firewire ports on the same card.

Yep ... I knew that, Adaptec makes the DuoConnect ... Actually I want to not use a PCI slot ... just want to plug a Firwaire device in to an adapter cable and then plug the other end in to a USB2 port ...

[jptaz]

I am guessing this is not possible because the two technologies are very different. Firewire to USB 1.1 or 2.0 might be possible but not the other way around because Firewire is more related to SCSI than a traditional Serial device.

The reason is that the firewire is capable of both master and slave relationship. This is why windows can create a firewire network by simply plugging a plain old firewire cable between two pcs and using the built in firewire networking, While to do the same thing with USB a special cable and drivers are needed to connect two PCs. Basically in the USB world you are either a host(Master) or a device(Slave). A Device can not send a message to the PC, but rather the PC polls the device which basically is like reading from memory. If the device has nothing to say it basically returns empty data indicating it is idle and has nothing to say to the host. This makes USB devices very cheap since they don't need much intelligence. On the other hand firewire, like SCSI requires that each device be self sustaining and be able to negotiate with the other devices the use of the bandwidth.

What is nice about this is that the PC can be completely left out of the loop when a transfer is initiated between to Firewire devices. For example a Firewire digital video camera transer to a firewire Digital VCR. THe PC basically sends a command to the digital video camera saying copy so much data to the vcr and then it is no longer involved in the transfer at all except maybe to query the devices to see if the transfer is complete. The same task in USB would mean that the PC would have to be heavily involved in the transfer. Basically it would have to read the data from the USB Digital video Camera and then write the data to the USB Digital VCR. This transfer would in theory take at least twice as long as the firewire since it is a 3 point transfer instead of a 2 point, but if the two devices where on two different route hubs then it would be the same, but would still require a lot of attention from the PC.

Sorry for the long explanation.

John

[Menehune]

Do you have header pins on the motherboard? I'm guessing not since you have a PCI FW card.

I wonder if you could you use something like this PCI riser card to plug two PCI cards into one slot? It is mainly used for mini-ATX motherboards, but I wonder if it will work in a full sized motherboard? You would probably need to hack the case to make the two cards mount 90 degrees to the standard PCI cards.

[mightyt]

jptaz - Thanks for the explanation ... actually I am interested in Firewire --> USB2 and surprised not to see such a cable / adapter / converter widely available.

Menehune - Thanks as well ... Actually no I don't ... my mobo has no integrated Firewire nor Riser Card option. That's what made me begin to think about this, plus I thought if there was such a thing, Firewire would then be as accessible as any devices with USB2, which today is rather plentiful.

Originally Posted by Menehune

Do you have header pins on the motherboard? I'm guessing not since you have a PCI FW card.

I wonder if you could you use something like this PCI riser card to plug two PCI cards into one slot? It is mainly used for mini-ATX motherboards, but I wonder if it will work in a full sized motherboard? You would probably need to hack the case to make the two cards mount 90 degrees to the standard PCI cards.