PCMCIA USB and Firewire adapter

ledclone: Yes, USB 1.1 is a completely inappropriate connection protocol for any hard drive, but especially a big one. It's unusably slow. If possible, you should return your USB/FW adapter card and put the refund toward a FireWire enclosure for your drive. In addition to being as fast or faster in real life than USB 2, it will be reliable — and bootable, which USB 2 is not with a Tibook. Bootability alone makes FireWire by far the better choice.

Just curious: since you already have a FW port on your Tibook, why did you pay extra for a combination adapter card?

What would have been, and still would be, a better choice is a FireWire drive, which you'd be able to use with your built-in Firewire port and no adapter card. But since you're probably stuck with the Iomega drive now, at least you could make it useful to yourself by throwing away Iomega's USB 2 enclosure (housing, case, shell, box) and putting the hard drive mechanism that's inside it into a new FireWire-connected enclosure instead. Just Google "FireWire hard drive enclosure," and look only at models designed for 3.5" drives. You'll find dozens to choose from in the $30-50 range. Be sure to buy one that includes a FW cable.

Hi, ledclone. So does the Archos unit work well with the card, or do you have trouble with big writes to that drive, too?

Any idea why it should freeze my mac. Is it something to do with the fact it wants to transfer at a faster speed but the PCMCIA card will not let it...

I'm sorry, but I can't answer this. I just don't know.