PCMCIA cards for adding firewire?

[ncoday]

Has anyone had luck on using one of these PCMCIA cards for adding a Firewire port to the T30s??

[stgreek]

Has anyone had luck on using one of these PCMCIA cards for adding a Firewire port to the T30s??

The IBM one works perfectly fine wiha T23 and a T40 here, dont see why it wouldnt with a T30. Very small, unobtrusive, I highly recommend it.

[RonS]

Also check out the LaCie firewire card. It's super-fast on my T42, able to sustain over 64MB/sec, bursting to 77MB/sec.

[kknute]

I have a Belkin F5U512 Firewire Cardbus card that I have used for awhile (more than a year) and it has worked fine once I figured out how to install it. A parameter in the BIOS needed to be changed to get it to work. Automatic power management of the PCMCIA slot must be turned off in the BIOS (don't know why but it solved the problem). I bought this card because it has a toggle so the firewire ports do not obstruct the other adjacent PCMCIA slot since I use that one also. Many of the available cards have a wide end with integral ports that obstruct the adjacent slot.

[zver17]

I used a trendnet(FW400) card and a lacie(FW400/800) card. both work as specified (I havent had a chance to test the FW800 capability yet).

Rons: do you use the power supply with the Lacie card? Incidentaly, I had to ship back a defective BigDisk (wouldnt format under win or mac) - hope to get a replacement soon.

Also, whilst on the topic of FW and PCMCIA cards... the T42 has 2 card slots, but it seems impossible to use 2 cards simultaneously (the connection is not placed "upside down" for the lower slot, so that the body expansions of the FW cards get in each others way. Is this intentional - and if so, why?

[zver17]

i noticed that if I use the Lacie firewire 400/800 card WITHOUT the power adapter to connect to an external DVD burner (which has it own powersupply), WindowsMediaPlayer dies 10-20sec after starting to play Cd's. This hasnt occured (at least yet) when using the power adapter. Neither does the problem occur with a trendNet firewire400 card (no adapter). the DVD burner is at the moment the only device connected via the cards (although in the future I will add a Lacie BigDisk HDD)

I expected I would need to use the Lacie card's power adapter only for bus-powered hardware (whereas DVD burner has own power supply). So are my problems normal or is the card defective in any way?

any comments from more informed people? thanks in advance.

[Kailash Nathan]

I have been using the Adaptec FireConnect for Notebooks and the Adaptec DuoConnect for Notebooks on my Dell C600 and my T42p. When i power up an external drive and then plug in my firewire card it detects the drive right away but it takes about a minute for the contents of the drive to be accessible through My Computer, etc. It could be because the drive is 200gb!

Also the USB 2.0 ports on the DuoConnect card don't seem to work well with my thinkpad, though on a Dell C600 it worked perfectly

[RonS]

I don't use the external power supply. I tried with with and without it, it worked both ways, so I just unplugged it.

You can only use one LaCie card on the T42, because the end connector is bulky so you can't stack two on top of each other. But you could use one on the main T42, and another in the dock if you wanted, since the dock has an extra pair of PCMCIA slots. I should give it a try, I have two cards and two LaCie drives sitting right here...

[nikemen]

Is this the trendware one you use?

only 10$ is a nice deal and FREE shipping

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDe ... 158&depa=0