General Cardbus and Firewire Networking Speed Questions

[Jiggly]

I have a PC Card Firewire adapter and a different USB 2.0 adapter for my aging PIII laptop (Inspiron 7500). They both said "up to 400Mbps" on the box. However the laptop's transfer rates are definitely nowhere near as fast as desktop FireWire or USB 2.0 when connected to external drives, and are also much slower than the laptop's internal transfers between HDD partitions.

I found this on Tom's Hardware Guide in a FAQ: Since Firewire has a 15ft cable length limitation, its networking uses are limited to quick system-to-system connections for file transfer purposes, running at speeds between 12.5 to 50Mbps. Which is slower than standard 100Mbps Ethernet..? Sounds wrong, but I am getting slow transfers.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/FAQ-27-General+Networking-0.php#240

I've also read differing reports saying that the maximum throughput of a Cardbus/Type II PC Card slot is actually around 133Mbps at 33Mhz, OR 133MBps, depending who typed the B.

I know FireWire is 400 Mega BIT per second peak, so is Cardbus 133 MegaBIT or MegaBYTE per second? It all gets confusing when you're not entirely sure people are using their B's and b's correctly..

So I'm left wondering, if the cardbus is fast enough, is it the computer slowing things down.. or is it possible different PC Card manufacturers use lousy chipsets?

[Greg12]

If your desktop is faster than your laptop, that is one reason. Also, remember those r the theoretical max speeds, you'll never get close to them in real life.

[redwudz]

I believe SiSandra will check transfer speeds, and quite a few other things on your system. You might give it a try http://www.overclockersclub.com/downloadcenter/download.php?action=file&id=12