Mammoth Software

[mammoth]

Powerfile has a list of supported firewire cards. Defined at [url]http://www.powerfile.none/index.php?file=c-qualified_components[/url]

The cards above have been thoroughly tested to work with a Dual Drive PowerFile. They used to have the same 32 bit cards with those manufacturers on their site. Most consumer related activity can use the 32 bit cards.

If you plan on using a PowerFile with a single drive, i.e. Sony or Niveus box. Having those specific cards listed above are less critical.

We have used other cards and have experienced undefined behavior and/or early hardware failure. In general most firewire cards that have a TI (Texas Instrument) based chipset appear to work better with PowerFiles. Which excludes most embedded firewire cards on motherboards and in laptops.

[pietmeyn]

Which 32-bit cards do you recommend? Powerfile recommended ones on their page are all 64-bit and the folks with older motherboards will not be too happy about that. I personally use a SY-VIA-4FC which has a VIA VT6306 chip. That might be the reason why I have to power the Sony changers up first, than the PC, than the PowerExplorer which give me an Slot-Error (show 255 even I have only 101 discs in) and then reboot the changers. From then on the system is running stable unless it enter sleep mode. - But may be I still have not inserted the right mixture of XP Service Packs, dll patches and so on. We should not forget, running MS-OS is a little like mixing your special gas at the station for optimal performance of your car. Which mixture of serviece packs and dll's do you recommend by the way? Can't you put a MS mixture for different firewire cards and firmware on your download site? That would at least save your customers a lot of time trying to get this one dll which microsoft send you only after special request and hours of service calls and endless reading of bulletins why they are not able to write a decent fire wire driver for their OS.

[mammoth]

PowerFile used to recommened 3 different 32 bit Firewire cards; SIIG, Adaptec, and PPA. It it our experience that it depends on how many drives you are operating. If you are driving only 1 drive, many firewire cards will work, however we don't recommend most embedded (laptop) firewire cards or most of those less then $30 cheap Chinese cards. We found one manufacturer that had $30 cards and after pushing them on a 200 disc rip, the hardware flacked out on 3 cards. We would recommend sticking to the manufacturers recommended above for single drive. Although like the Digital Living System, they use an embedded card and it appears to work fine with a single drive PowerFile. So if you're experiencing strange hang ups or flacky behavior like with a VIA chipset, look at upgrading. For dual drive operations, we only recommend SIIG. There is some timing issue that SIIG seems to handle better then all the other cards we've tried.

As for the drivers... we recommend PowerFile's 5.4 driver only because it doesn't try to handle timeout issues when the drive hangs reading a disc. PowerFile should have it available on their website.

[pietmeyn]

SIIG has a bunch of cards, also with via chipset. So I guess you have one with TI chipset. How about NN-830012-S2 (http://onlinestore.siig.none/shopexd.asp?id=719) US$ 70.- or
NN-400012-S8 (http://onlinestore.siig.none/shopexd.asp?id=54) US$ 50.- or would you put a JU-2NG012 (2*FW, 2*USB, 1*Gigalan for US$ 100.- in the system?
With the SIIG, 3xXLB1 and PowerArchiv running MP3 from ANY changer no problem?

[mammoth]

SIIG has recently change their lineup and are mainly pushing the Firewire 800 series with the 9 pin connectors. The fisrt card you recommended is one that should work fine, however i don't like the white converters(6 to 9 pin) that SIIG supplies. I suggest purchasing a 6 to 9 pin cable, although the converter does work, they just fall out sometimes.

I'm not familiar with the multi-device cards.