Hey guys, I've been lurking a while just kind of absorbing again.

A PCMCIA Firewire card for a laptop to be specific. I had a live recording session this weekend and was preparing for it when I found that my 4 pin FW port was no longer making connection with my interface or HD when I plugged it in. Uh oh.

So I scooted on down to Best buy to pick up a PC FW card with 3 ports, been meaning to do it anyway so it worked out. Up to this point I've always just recorded shows to the internal HD which is a 7200rpm 60GB drive. It works great, have had no problems.

A while back I purchased a 160GB external FW drive for storage of projects when they're not in the current rotation. I decided to try loading one of my old projects straight from the external drive and see if it would work alright, but no go. Everytime the drive would read I would get cracklin' going on.

It is a 7200rpm drive, so it should be fast enough, but I am running both my interface and the drive off the PCMCIA card and I was wondering if that may be the problem. Not enough throughput on that port for both devices?

Any thoughts?