I'm thinking about buying a firewire 800 PCI card for an older Mac G4 computer that's doing video work, mostly archiving to FW, but sometimes working directly to the drives. I'm a little worried about compatibility with final cut pro 4.5/OS 10.3.9. I've searched around the final cut sites, and haven't been able to come up with anything. Anybody have any experience with this? Do you think it's worth $50-$100 in data thruput? Theoretically the data should be going twice as fast, however, the tech specs I've been able to find indicate it's more like the difference between 50MB/sec and 60MB/sec. Is it really only that much?

I personally would be more inclined to put in an external SATA card and use SATA drives. You'll probably get more longevity out of them, since that's the emerging standard.

But are you having problems with what you have? If not, there's no point in dropping money just for the heck of it.

I am having some problems with bottlenecking when the projects get really big. (at the end) Already own 10+ drives(!) that have the FW 800 port on them - unfortunately, none of my computers have the FW800. The plug & play and ability to archive of FW are major features, while being able to work on each drive as a self contained "show" is the thing I'm hoping to improve on. A show might end up containing 150 GB of material. I can limp through with the FW400 and not looking just to buy something to buy it - hoping to save time & $$!

The important thing will be whether there are OS X drivers for the card, or that the card requires none (using the built-in drivers).

Applications won't care about the card and FW connection; they just see disk space.

I haven't researched any of these cards.

The other thing is that the data rate might not be doubled, because there's a lot going on between the application and the actual hardware.

It may take some effort to determine where the bottleneck is. Could be raw CPU speed (which would limit the OS speed), could be data-transfer speed, could even be the drives themselves.

I still say SATA is the best expansion format to invest in, for the reason I mentioned.

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satahostcards.php

They all work in OS X, but some aren't bootable. I'd personally stay away from those models.

Two other points. First, you do know that FW400 drives slow an 800 bus down to their speed, right? And second, have you played around with putting the video on a standard ATA bus and using FW for audio? That's what most people do, and it seems to be fine.

Got it, Nick. Too bad I already own the drives... and I don't have enough internal drive space to or time be able to transfer, store and move all of this data around quickly and easily. The SATA will be the way I go to upgrade all of the internal drives at some point down the road. In the meantime, the FW 800 card will provide a workable stopgap solution.

After more investigation, the "real world" data transfer rate for the OWC FW 400 is 39 MB/sec, the "real world" transfer rate of the OWC FW 800 with the PCI card is 63 MB/sec. I'll buy that for $50. Thanks you guys.