Pcie card for firewire connectivity

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A friend of mine is selling his firewire interface and I'm interested but my computer doesn't have a firewire connection. I thought about getting a firewire card to make it work, would that work or would it cause latency or driver issues? Is usb 2.0 faster anyway?
 
Hi there,
The idea of using a pcie firewire card is fine and, in principle, won't introduce any issues.

Whether or not a given card will be compatible, or play nice, with a given interface is another matter though. Firewire is notoriously fussy on Microsoft platforms.

Whether USB2 is faster isn't really relevant because both exceed the interface requirements by far.
Since you asked, though, USB2 theoretic throughput is slightly faster than that of FW400, but in practice FW generally outperforms USB2 by quite a bit, as far as I know.

I think unless you have (or are buying) a combination that's known to work well together, I'd just go USB 2.

Hope that's helpful.
 
I use a PCIe Firewire card...but not for interface use, rather just for external HD use, and for that, the Firewire is faster than USB when you need to transfer large files, especially when using the Firewire 800 format, though even the 400 is fast.
 
Thanks for the replies. Sounds like I'd be better off getting a USB 2.0 interface instead, the last thing I need is a head ache. I wish pcie cards weren't so expensive because those seem to be the best as far as latency, some even have dsp effects. What ever happened to emu? Heh..
 
There are USB/Firewire interfaces with DSP too, although you'll pay for it.
Maybe it's different at higher track counts or sample rates/bit-depth but, for me anyway, latency hasn't been an issue for many years.
With good drivers and modern computing power, it really shouldn't be. :)
 
I use a firewire PCI on my studio computer, I installed it because my interface was firewire and I did not want to buy another. I made sure that the card had an interface manufacturers recommend chip set. Never had a problem. However if I was going to buy a new interface now I would get a USB one, manly due to my new laptop (which is not the studio computer) not having a firewire card.

Alan.
 
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