Sonnet Firewire: An Update

A few months back, I gave a plug for Sonnet's Tempo Express 800 PCI-E card that adds Firewire 800 ports. Well, I finally got a chance to try it out and found out it was a mixed bag. I found that it performed well when there was only one G-Raid2 attached. But when I added a few drives to the card, write performance for my G-Raid2 dropped from around 45 MB/sec to 22 MB/sec. This was only marginally better than the 19 MB/sec I got from an Aaxeon Firewire 800 PCI-E card. Read performance doesn't seem to be effected by how many devices are on the card, based on my tests. Luckily as I'm not capturing any high data-rate formats or codecs, 20 MB/sec is fast enough for what I do. But it does slow me down for file transfers when firewire 800 can't even keep up with my Gigabit ethernet.