Number one thing to remember if you use a firewire device then you have used up all of the ONE firewire BUS (not port for which there are 3 connected to that one bus). Therefore you WILL need a PCIe card if you want to run firewire drives off your mac for samples, freezes etc. If you don't you greatly increase your risk of crashing (in my experience) ***a lot*** and also greatly reduce the performance of your hard drives. You definately need a PCIe card for extra firewire then you'll get max performance. My advice is to use the FW on your mac for your audio device and use a PCI card for your drives the reason being if you buy a PCI 800 card you can't inadvertently forget and plug an ipod or something into the mac fw400 port and screw up your drives, whereas if you plug in your ipod with your audio interface running it will probably work, or at worst it will crash your system but the point is no danger to your drives as such. If you use a fw400 audio interface (800 seems unnecessary to me) then if you do plug in an ipod you won't have any dramas and can even plug in ONE fw400 drive for backups etc that should not disrupt your interface for general use but that is not recommended when you are using logic as this can still cause crashes in my experience. Bottom line, one device per bus. the mac has ONE bus. a PCI card has ONE bus (even if it has two/three ports). If you buy two PCI cards, you'll have two extra busses. SOME PCI cards are dual BUS (I've heard but never seen one). If they say specifically "4 port 2 bus" it's probably true but I would still check it out. You should probably expect to pay around twice the price as it has double the technology on the card. Having said that fw pci cards are pretty cheap and easy to install, you can add two, giving you enough bandwidth for 4 very fast firewrire 800 drives, two on each bus, plus your audio interface on the mac. two drives raided for sample streaming, and 2 drives raided for audio and freeze tracks, use your second internal drive (if you have one) for backups.
Miklos.
Miklos.