Belkin Firewire USB Combo Card Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

If you’ve read the Aten Firewire card review, you’ll know that I am a fan of Firewire (IEEE 1394); if not solely for the bandwidth, for the ease of use as well. It’s no secret that SCSI outperforms Firewire on several fronts, but IEEE 1394 is much easier to configurw and work with, which is more important for less experienced user (or for those fed-up with their tools impeding their productivity).

With a maximum data throughput rate of 400Megabits per second (50Mbytes/s), Firewire is well ahead of the 12Mb/s (1.5MB/s) that USB sports, but not quite up to snuff with the 80MB/s of Ultra2/Wide SCSI. I like to think of Firewire as the median between USB and SCSI: the simplicity of the former and (near) the performance of the latter. But as I mentioned in the Aten IC-1394 Firewire card review:

Another thing to keep in mind is that often Firewire devices limit the transfer speed before the maximum interface bandwidth comes into play. Firewire hard drives and CD-Rs, for example, are actually IDE devices that are adapted for the Firewire interface. Since SCSI-based drives generally perform much faster than IDE ones, this performance difference carries over to Firewire as well. Other factors such as large-file transfer efficiency, make SCSI the choice for performance critical systems. In most other situations, though, Firewire is the apt solution (did I mention Firewire is cheaper?? :] ).

Now that we have a general knowledge of the IEEE 1394 interface under our belts, let us take a closer look at the Belkin USB / Firewire combo.

Specs

Interface	PCI 2.1
Ports	2 external Firewire / 2 external USB / 1 internal Firewire
Platforms	Windows 98 / ME / 2000
Other	Plug and Play, IEEE 1394 OHCI compliant

The interesting aspect of this card is the combination of Firewire and USB onto one card. Having the internal Firewire port has the obvious advantage of being able to use internal Firewire devices – this is something we didn’t see on Aten’s card. On the external side of things we have 2 Firewire and 2 USB ports which should be plenty for most configurations (daisy-chains anyone?). As just about every motherboard manufactured in the last few years has at least 2 USB ports built in, the extra USB ports aren’t crucial in all situations, but they can be very useful with certain configurations. Some USB devices specify that they should be plugged directly into a dedicated USB port (ie: not through a hub) – this makes me wonder why a single USB port can theoretically host up to 127 devices… sort of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it. Anyhoo, having two extra USB can be most rewarding in situations like that.

Box Contents

Manual
Software CD
4-pin to 2-pin Firewire cable
Firewire/USB Card

The petit manual provides excellent installation instructions for getting the card up and running your system. There also a number of diagrams that make things even easier.

The software CD includes MGI’s PhotoSuite III and Videowave III for editing photos and video respectively (bet you wouldn’t have guessed that :] ). While not the best at what they do, these programs can still be quite useful for your basic editing needs and they certainly add value to the package.

The package also includes a 4-pin to 2-pin Firewire cable. Honestly, I have never seen a device that used a 2-pin Firewire connector which isn’t to say that there are none, because there obviously are some, I just don’t know what they are. As such, I can’t evaluate the value of this cable. It must have some use though so I will consider it a “good thing”.