Firewire and gigabit ethernet question

[Philippine Mango]

Does each firewire port on the 400 card provide 400mbps bandwidth or is it split among each other? I'm also seeing that there could be a problem if I try to put a gigabit card in a PCI slot with these firewire cards.

 

[AristoV300]

In theory each port should provide 400mbps.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: AristoV300
In theory each port should provide 400mbps.

Eh? No, most cards just have 1 root port that the others are built from. The bandwidth will be split unless otherwise noted(i.e. there's more than 1 controller chip on the board). And yes, there will be issues with having a GigE card and a Firewire card on the same board, a GigE card will eat a PCI bus' bandwidth on its own(in theory it should be slightly below, but in practicality it isn't), so you can't utilize the full bandwidth of both at the same time.

 

[V00D00]

are you going to be transfering at gigabit speeds and using the full bandwidth of the firewire at the same time? If so, then yes, you will see a performance hit. Just the gigabit can slow you down quite a bit, as it already saturates the full 133MB of bandwidth available on the PCI bus.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Is a 10/100 card sufficient for a file server? What if I wanted to record video onto the file server in real time, would that be possible?

 

[ViRGE]

Record video via an Ethernet connection? That's bad mojo, if you're serious about wanting to record video to another machine, we're talking about Fibre Channel or some sort of other storage-based technology here, Ethernet isn't going to be adequate(especially not 10/100, you must have GigE if you're even going to attempt it).