Granite Digital FireWire 800 Hot-Swap Series - Manual (Page 3)

Up to 63 devices can be daisy-chained together.
Computer
Hard
Drive
DVD
Hard
Drive
CD
ROM
Camera
Granite Digital • 3101 Whipple Rd. • Union City, Ca. 94587 www.granitedigital.com
How FireWire Works
FireWire (IEEE-1394) is a High Performance Serial Bus designed to go up
to 800Mbits per second. This ultra-fast data transfer rate is perfect for storage
applications using hard drives, cd-roms, optical drives, and tape drives. It is
also the solution of choice for digital video camcorders and digital audio. The
Firewire Bus allows up to 63 devices to be daisy-chained together.
Using Granite Digital FireVue™ Cables the distance between devices is
increased to 32 feet; twice the IEEE1394 16 foot limitation. FireWire is “Hot-
Pluggable” which allows the capability to add or remove any device with the
computer turned on. Our case kit also provides power to the 1394 bus which
allows the FireVue Case to be used with laptop computers and digital cameras.
If your computer does not have a built-in FireWire Port, there are two
ways that you can add FireWire to your system. The first way is with the
addition of a FireWire PCI Host Adapter. These small inexpensive cards
simply plug into an open PCI slot. If possible, use only host adapters that use
the TI (Texas Instruments) controller chip. These cards seem to be more com-
patible with all the available devices on the market. The second method of
adding FireWire to a computer is with a PCMCIA CardBus Card. This is the
preferred method when using laptop computers since they do not usually have
available PCI slots. Again, the TI chipset seems to be the most
compatible and is highly recommended.
USERS GUIDE Page 3