General Q about USB and Firewire adaptors

[Madison Kelly]

Walter Dnes wrote:
>   I have two not-so-new computers at home which, if I select the
> appropriate option in the BIOS, will optionally support USB 1.1 as well
> as the standard USB 1.0.  Gentoo USB support goes as low as USB 1.1, so
> my trailing-edge machines can talk to my new USB2+firewire external
> drive... very slowly.  A big backup becomes an overnight job.
> 
>   I'm seriously thinking of getting a PCI-based adaptor card with USB2
> and firewire ports.  Are there any boobytraps?  The adaptor will first
> go into my 450 mhz, 128 megs ram, Dell, which refuses to die.  I bought
> it in September of 1999.
> 
>   What are your real-life experiences like with PCI adaptor cards?  I'll
> probably want both types of ports in one kit, just to cover my bases.
> Different eripherals will be showing up with only one type of connector.
> 

I bought a Belkin PCI card for an older test machine I've been using to 
write my backup program which uses USB/Firewire drives and it's worked 
fine under the Fedora Core distros. It isn't too pricy, either:

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=200433&pcount=&Product_Id=122771

They have a five-port as well. Also, I use their PCMCIA version USB2.0 
card in my Thinkpad under FC (1 through 3 now) for the same project and 
it also works fine.

HTH

Madison
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