NitroAV has announced an industry first: a FireWire800 ExpressCard/34 – the ‘ExpressWay Series’. This new FireWire 800 ExpressCard/34 allows 15-inch MacBook Pro users to easily connect FireWire 800 peripherals via the ExpressCard/34 slot. 17-inch MacBook Pro users can increase their FireWire 800 ports from the built-in single port to a total of three ports with this card. ExpressCard technology offers an increased transfer rate and better efficiency between the computer and external peripherals vs. PCMCIA.
The 2-Port NitroAV FireWire 800 Professional ExpressCard/34 Interface Adapter for Apple MacBookPro retails for US$89.95.
More info here.
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Related MacDailyNews article:
Vydeo debuts dual-port eSATA ExpressCard/34 for Apple MacBook Pro – April 06, 2006
Use the ExpressCard slot to add FireWire 800 to Apple’s new MacBook Pro – January 15, 2006
Bah, Firewire 800 is weak. Since it’s only for storage use, everyone may as well move to SATA connections, since the speed is far, far greater.
mugwump:
I was crusious after reading your response and looked over at Wikipedia. I typed in Sata and found that SATA speads are 1.5 Gb/s and 3 Gb/s. I then did a look for FireWire. Near the bottom it listed FireWire 800 at 3.2 Gb/s
What part of 3.2 Gb/s is far far lesser to 3 Gb/s?
Sata: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA
FireWire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire
oops. Screwed the pooch there, didn’t ya?
>>everyone may as well move to SATA connections
Uh, yeah. Right. I’ll just plug that SATA cable into… my USB port? Jeez…
Uh, you plug the SATA cable into… your…. ExpressCard slot. Did you happen to read the title at the top of this page?
From the Wikipedia article mentioned above:
“FireWire 800 (Apple’s name for the 9-pin “S800 bilingual” version of the IEEE1394b standard) was introduced commercially by Apple in 2003. This newer 1394 specification and corresponding products allow a transfer rate of 786.432 Mbit/s with backwards compatibility to the slower rates and 6-pin connectors of FireWire 400.”
Sooooo, it’s 800 Mbit/s, not 3 billion bits or whatever you thought.
800mbit/s is 100MBytes per second.
A two port SATA card can get you 400MBytes per second, if you are so inclined and you have some drives in a RAID box. You know, so your MacBookPro could do some real HD editing.
**cough** 80MB/s – it’s 10bits/byte due to 8B/10B expansion in all moden serial streams (including PCIe). And with overhead currently maxes out at about 56MB/s (though this may be more due to harddrive limitations than protocol overhead). For comparison sake, LAN operates at 10MB/s (though due to TCP/IP overhead, maxes out at about 6-7MB/s).
This is a common mistake. As an aside, gigabit ethernet typically runs up to 1250MHz, which is why you can say it can handle 125MB/s, not because 1000/8=125.
No SATA drive is currently capable of fully utilizing SATA bandwidth of 1.5Gbit/s. Infact, SATA available bandwidth is still 50% faster than the fastest 15K SCSI drive on the market, and typically faster than the 133MHz SDRAM cache. SATA-II is overkill – it would take a RAID0 array of several drives to hit the SATA-II ceiling. But by then, you’re more limited to PCIe and memory bandwidth limitations.
What a bad design, not clean at all like a PC Laptop a Wart hanging out the side of your computer Fugly! Bring back a simple clean Firewire port!