Installation of the Advansys IEEE1394 card was simple with the necessary drivers for the adapter card being pulled from Windows 98SE, no additional drivers were required. Thus installation was a simple matter of disassembling the case, and installing the card in an open PCI slot, putting things back together and booting up.

 

Just to re-iterate IEEE1394 devices will only work with Windows 98 Second Edition operating system or later. Apparently Microsoft did not incorporate the appropriate FireWire support in its earlier OS's, including plain old Windows 98.

 

Since we tested this IEEE1394 card by way of a data transfer test, a combination of Sandra benchmarks and timed data transfers to an external harddrive were used. In previous tests, discrepancies with the values Sandra reported were noted, so the timed tests add a useful perspective. The test consisted of moving 1.9Gb files via the IEEE1394 card to the FireWire based HotDrive. For comparison, we performed the same tests with the Evergreen IEEE1394 adapter card.

 

The timed trials tend to illustrate the how the data transfers are actually taking place, and give a more palatable Mb/s rating. A 1.9Gb file was transferred to the external FireWire drive, from two different internal hard drives, and then between the drives themselves. The duration of the transfer was then used to find the resulting Mb/s. As the only variable in each of the tests was the alternating IEEE1394 card, this should serve to illustrate how the data flows through the individual cards. The data transfer between the two internal hard drives serves as a reference to illustrate overall all system transfer speeds.

As you can see by the trials, the Advansys IEEE1394 PCI adapter card faired a bit better in the timed tests than the reference Evergreen IEEE1394 PCI adapter card did. The benchmarking results from Sandra of data flow through each of the two IEEE1394 cards show a 2:1 difference in the performance of the HotDrive when connected to the Advansys IEEE1394 card further emphasizing the point.

As the Advansys IEEE1394 PCI adapter card is based on a single chip design, procedures appear to be carried out more efficiently then with the reference Evergreen dual chip design. The IEEE1394 chipset on the Advansys card is manufactured by Fujitsu and capable of 100Mbit/s, 200Mbit/s or 400Mbit/s data transfers at a 133Mb/s Host Bus Data Rate while supporting three IEEE1394 ports.

With out going into too much detail the chipset combines PHY and OHCI functions into a single device, and supports some nifty features such as 'look ahead context processing'.

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Contents of Article: Advansys IEEE1394  Pg 1.  Advansys IEEE1394 Adapter Review  Pg 2.  Looking Closer at the Components  Pg 3.  — Installation and Benchmarks  Pg 4.  Chipset and Conclusion