Startech Card Bus IEEE-1394 Firewire Notebook Card
See it at Amazon.com for $25.62Average Customer Rating
(4.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(5 out of 5)PCMCIA cards WILL NOT POWER IPODS!
Some people are rating this card down incorrecty. To set the matter straight:
The PCMCIA bus specification does not provide enough power to allow the PCMCIA cards to power external devices. Therefore, the PCMCIA Firewire cards do not provide enough power to the Firewire bus.
NO PCMCIA firewire cards can charge an ipod by itself (using the laptop's battery). PCI firewire cards (the kind for you desktop) CAN, but PCMCIA cards (the ones for you laptop) CANNOT. It is not a "feature" that this card lacks.
HOWEVER: Some PCMCIA cards come with an input for an external power adaptor, including this Startech card (as another reviewer mentioned). So basically, you plug an external adapter into the port (which you can see in the picture) and the external adapter will then power the firewire card, letting it charge your ipod. As far as I can tell, this feature isn't available on a lot of cheaper models. But you WILL have to have an external power adapter to use this feature.
So again, NO PCMCIA cards can self power an ipod while charging. Don't rate a product down for something that's not possible.
(4 out of 5)Powered Firewire is possible
One of the reviews above states that this adapter won't provide power to devices such as the Apple iPod. You actually can power these devices by plugging an external power adapter into the card. This feature appears to be undocumented, but the plug is clearly visible to the left of the 1394 ports.
I phoned the Startech customer support, and they said that you can use any generic DC adapter, with the following settings: 12 volt DC, 3 amp, and a plug with positive (+) in the centre.
Hope it helps.
(5 out of 5)Works with Linux
I got this card to go with my iPod (2nd gen 10GB) and my IBM ThinkPad 600X which is currently running Mandrake 9.1. It worked straight out of the box, no config changes needed! Very impressive. One thing to note is the picture does not show the connectors (bulky plastic, not dongle as pic suggests). This might be a issue if you want to use two PCMCIA cards at the same time and the other card is thicker at end sticking out (wifi antenna for example).
Other than that, it is perfect.
(5 out of 5)Works great with my iPod!
I bought this to transfer music to my new 10gig iPod. Installation was very easy on my laptop (running Windows 2000 Pro, SP 3.) Windows installed the drivers as soon as I plugged the card into the laptop and the iPod synced up just as easily. I didn't need the video editing software that came with this card (Ulead's Video Studio SE) so I can't comment on its usefulness.
I haven't used Firewire before since I work with PCs mostly so I was amazed at how fast the transfer is with Firewire. I transferred 9gigs of music (2750 files) to the iPod in 40 minutes. I have an old mp3 player that works with USB 1.1 and it takes 40 minutes to transfer 30 songs!
You should be careful to always use Windows' "Unplug or Eject Hardware" utility to disable the iPod and/or Startech card before diconnecting them from the laptop; I forgot once and had to reboot the laptop but I didn't have problems with the iPod (thank goodness!) Good product for a reasonable price. Not as cheap as the PCI cards at Compusa, but the best price I could find for a PCMCIA version. And it works great!
(5 out of 5)Works great with Apple iPod
I bought this card to be able to use an Apple iPod with my Windows 2000 laptop. If you are running Windows 2000 or XP, your laptop will immediately recognize this card and install all necessary drivers. Within 10 minutes of plugging in this card, I had hooked up my iPod and transferred my entire music collection to it.