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Gear / Technical Help => Post-Processing, Computer / Streaming / Internet Devices & Related Activity => Topic started by: JasonSobel on October 01, 2006, 04:02:00 PM

Title: new firewire PCI card - wicked slow - any help?
Post by: JasonSobel on October 01, 2006, 04:02:00 PM

Hey folks,
I just bought a firewire PCI card, installed it on my last free slot, and fired her up.
to test it out, I connected my HD-P2, and I was planning to transfer a file.
it seems to be working, but it's very slow.  it says it's going to take 102 minutes to copy a file that's about 950 MB.  if I pop the CF card and transfer it with my USB 2.0 card reader, it takes ~12 minutes.  clearly, something is wrong.

this is the card that I bought:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815108005 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815108005)

is there something wrong with the PCI card?  is there anything I'm doing wrong?
all I did was snap the card into place, and then I plugged in a spare power cable to the card, so that it would be able to supply bus power of firewire.
I didn't have to install drivers or anything, and it says that I shouldn't have too, with Windows XP.

any ideas?

Title: Re: new firewire PCI card - wicked slow - any help?
Post by: dnsacks on October 02, 2006, 07:07:21 PM

try swapping the firewire card with the card in the slot above it and see if that changes anything.  PCI cards share interrupts, etc. and sharing is determined by the slot you install the card into.  So, swapping the card up one slot could solve your possible sharing problem

Title: Re: new firewire PCI card - wicked slow - any help?
Post by: macdaddy on October 02, 2006, 07:45:02 PM

beat me to it...

try swapping pci slots and see what happens...

pain in the ass, but sometimes that isw the easiest way to get these things working...

Title: Re: new firewire PCI card - wicked slow - any help?
Post by: JasonSobel on October 02, 2006, 08:01:37 PM

I should have posted that in my original post.  yesterday evening, I tried the card in all three of my PCI slots.  no change that I could tell.  So, I returned the card today, and bought a different card.  Same problem.  I'm sure that the problem lies somewhere in my system, because I highly doubt I could have bought two bad cards (different brands, bought from different stores, etc).

so, any other ideas?
the windows device manager recognizes the card, and says it's working perfectly.  and as far as I can tell, firewire support is built into XP, so there isn't a driver to update or anything like that...

oh, and +T's for the help :)

Title: Re: new firewire PCI card - wicked slow - any help?
Post by: macdaddy on October 02, 2006, 08:11:55 PM

weird.

the only other thing is sometimes you need to install the drivers prior to plugging in the card...

fwiw - this is why i havent jumped to firewire on my large PCs, so i feel ya.

good luck.