How to get Firewire connectivity on your system

[Leonard]

Firewire is a better interface compared to USB. It offers you a higher data transfer rate and reliability. You might get easily frustrated when you try to transfer GBs of data from your usb to pc and the transfer rate shown screen lies below 5 mbps. So to avoid that you can have firewire connectivity on your system. This topic will help those who need firwire connectivity for their external drives to get faster data transfer rate. Remember that you will need to purchase a external disc that come with this port. This port commonly found in Apple devices. But luckily today there are ample of free adapters that can be used for this purpose. I will list some of the methods below by which you can have firewire connector on your system and the difference between different bandwidth. I am talking about the transfer rate here. Today USB 3.0 devices are announced which are capable of giving you around 500mbps tranfer rate. But depends on your controller you will have to stick with the existing instead of going for a costly upgrade.

If you plan to have a good storage support and prefer to buy a NAS device with firewire connectivity then go for that. Comparison to regular connection Firewire gives you more transfer rate. Compared to USB you can get double data transfer rate on Firewire. It comes in 400 and 800 version. If you have a Firewire 800 controller on your system then you can enjoy transfer speed of 800 mbps. Inshort Firewire is a high speed interface. That is quiet awesome. For that you do not require to change your motherbaord or buy a costly device. You just need to get a good adapter that can configure with your existing usb or a pcie card. In my advice a PCIe card is far better. While usb convertor restricts the transfer speed.

Firewire today is used in many devices. Like digital camera, external drives, etc. Firewire mostly comes with mac models. As it gain a nice popularity a couple of years ago. Many manufacturer adopted the connector later. Till today the most widely used data transfer controller is USB. Below I had mostly recommended Firewire 800 Pci card. Second to get better output use a Firwire device on the other end. Do not go for regular usb interface. There are many types of firewire adapter available for pcie slot.

Sonnet - Allegro FW800: FireWire 800 PCI Card: This is one of the best card you can go for. It has around 800mbps of transfer speed. Just hook your device on the card port and notice the difference. The specification of this cards shows 800/400/200/100 Mbits/s transfer speed. The connectivity is easy and you do not need to do any kind of major changes. It provides you a much better interface to transfer large size file.

Belkin FireWire 800 3-Port PCI Card - This is another card in the same range. You will get 3 firewire ports here which will improve you data transfer efficiency.

[Leonard]

Using Pci card for firewire connectivity is much better. It is advisable that you use card instead of usb adapter. Because the transfer speed is quiet affected when you use a usb to firewire adapter. Instead of that pci card is more better. Firewire 800 really offers you transfer speed of 800mbps if meets the right standard. I had have seen movies transfer very fast on firwire. I had transferred around 10gb of data from a camcorder. And it was just done in minutes.