PCMCIA-USB2 cards

Dear group,

I would like your advice as to the PCMCIA cards which allow USB2.0 capability? Is there any loss in throughput?

My laptop has USB1.1 capability and I would like to pursue the Lumenera/Infinity SKYnyx camera in lieu of the DMK offering. However, the Infinity requires USB2.0 (which I do not have) whereas the DMK requires IEEE-1394 (which I do have).

It would be nice to exploit my two available PCMCIA slots for upgrading to USB2.0 *** IF *** this is really doable as opposed to being a half-assed solution. These cards sell for quite cheap.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Hi Anthony,

it sounds like it would be fine to me. However, what are the internal specs for your laptop? Enough RAM and chip speed might determine the smoothness of your USB 2 card.

Anthony, I agree with Seanie. USB is very CPU intensive (unlike Firewire) so if you're unsure you're best bet is to check with a USB 2 card manufacturer as to what their recommended processor, RAM and HDD is.

Another factor when using devices like the Lumenera is your HDD speed. You'll probably need a fast hard disk to deal with the insane rates that that camera can manage. The Hitachi 7K100 series notebook drives are great at 7200rpm, whereas most others are 4200 or 5400.

BTW normal Firewire is already a bit faster than USB 2 already (480Mbps as opposed to 400Mbps - in theory).

Oh yeah, there's another factor - PCMCIA is slightly flawed in that it is very very very power hungry.

Cheers,

Trev

I dont see a problem with this, I think you'd be more limited by the CPU and memory then the PCMCIA card keeping up with the USB2.

Guys,

A big thanks to all of you for the advice and assistance.

I had to replace my hard disk a couple of years ago due to a crash and I seem to recall the replacement HD being either 5400 or 7200 RPM (I am leaning towards the latter). I may just open up the laptop to take a peek.

There is also the StreamPix software which supposedly exploits the RAM to speed up the writing (sort of like a cache/RAM disk) and which apparently does wonders. There was a very brief article in S&T about it and which was especially complimentary.

Great. You should be OK then I think.

BTW my comment about the PCMCIA being power hungry was in relation to battery power rather than CPU usage. If you have your notebook near a power supply you'll have no problems with that.

Trev