PCI vs. PCI Express USB/Firewire expansion cards

You NEED to buy PCI Express cards. Standard PCI card won't work.

There isn't much of a market for these cards.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Aaxeon/FWB3414/

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Aaxeon/USB4414N/

This review turned me off to the firewire card. It seems that the chip is a little brain dead on the FW800 side.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard66.html

I eventually decided to chain all my firewire devices. I also bough a bilingual Firewire cable to use the FW800 port with FW400 devices. Then I bought a 7 port USB2 hub for $40 (a gain of 6 ports), which beats shelling out $70 (a gain of four ports) for the card. I've always liked using PCI cards over hubs, but now that I was "forced" to use hubs, I don't mind. I even broke out an old USB1 hub and have had no problems.

Another reason I went with the hubs/device chaining is because I've read stories where cards suddenly stop working after updates to OS X. I'd have more faith if the card was made by Adaptec or OrangeMicro (R.I.P.).

A PCI-e 1394b card is also sold by SIIG. Their part number is NN-E38012-S2.

Good luck!

I have not seen any performance issue with the Aaxeon FW800 (only) card that I bought in September. I used it to create a RAID with the native FW800 port.

BUT... it does have a problem in my setup with freezing when coming out of sleep.

I've seen and read of enough problems with SIIG and Mac and OS X updates with SATA to avoid them totally (at one time they were safe but just ACard and firmware even used and had to come from them).

Yet another choice is the Belkin Firewire 800 PCI-e card. Two external and one internal 1394b ports and two external and one internal USB 2.0 ports. The Belkin part number is F5U602.

If you just want to expand usb, 4 outside 1 inside ports the belkin F5U252 worked for me.
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Rachael