General Q about USB and Firewire adaptors

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 11:25:44PM -0500, 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.

Well both usb2.0 (ehci) and 1394 (ohci firewire) are quite standardized,
and only a couple of makers make the controller chips.  They really
should just plug in and work in general.  You can even get cards for I
think under $50 that have a few of each type of port on it.  I haven't
actually tried such a card myself, since the machines I use firewire and
usb2 on have on onboard (where again it just works).

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml