The Product
Taking a look at the PCI card, one obvious thing that sticks out is the built-on power supply connector. This connection allows for the ability to connect one of your power supplies Molex connectors to it. This allows additional power for FireWire devices that require a lot of power to operate like scanners.

Some of you may be curious as to how FireWire compares to USB. In comparison to USB 1.1 implementations, FireWire definitely takes the cake. With USB 1.1 transferring at a measly speed of 12Mbit/sec, it proves to be no match for FireWire's 400Mbit/sec transfer speeds.

On the other hand, the new USB 2.0 implementation that is soon to be widely available is set to up the ante on FireWire with a transfer speed of 480Mbit/sec. I am hoping to do a comparison of the two when it becomes available.

Testing
For testing, I connected up a FireWire Hard Drive and CDRewriter. Both operated flawlessly and were easily detected on my machine running Windows ME. I was able to hot swap each of them without a problem.