I have read up on this and sadly, have gotten some contradicting information.
My issue is, my firewire units 'complained' when plugged into a PCI interface and requested they go direct into the board (and I'm really sorry I can't remember the exact error message as my PC is currently in pieces).
So, I can only assume this is the case because PCI is not fast enough / powerful enough.
Plugging direct into the IEEE header fixed the issue but my new motherboard doesn't have any IEEE headers (an oversight on my part!).
So is firewire to PCI vs PCI-E going to yield much difference in results. I have seen stats which show:
Firewire 800 - 800 megabits - 100MB/s
Firewire 400 - 400 megabits - 50MB/s
PCI - 133MB/s
PCI-E x1 - 250MB/s
PCI-E x16 - 4,000MB/s
But on the same forum they can be quoted "Pretty much the fastest protocol can't saturate a PCI's bandwidth, so you don't really need to go to PCI-E." This worries me as I've just spent a lot on a motherboard and need to get the firewire working.
I will be plugging in 2 Firewire devices into the firewire interface (this is for music recording and I assume quality is key as there is a lot of data transfer).
Anyway, my question is, is there any difference in speed between a firewire plugged into PCI, PCI-E and PCI-X for both firewire 400 and firewire 800?
Thank you
Dave