Customer Reviews

SmartDisk FireWire CardBus Card

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This card is an off-branded "SmartDisk" card, with no mention of the VST brand anywhere on it. Although installation under Windows 2000 was a snap (plug it in), my iPod has yet to work correctly with it on any of my laptops. Instead of recognizing the iPod as a drive, it recognizes it and then dumps it over and over after 3 or 4 seconds. In addition, the power provided by the card requires plugging in a clunky AC wall adapter to a port on the Firewire card -- not as elegant as I had expected.

if your laptop does not have a firewire port, you need a pcmcia firewire card. this one is inexpensive and it gets the job done. i would not use this to charge your ipod though because it sucks up laptop battery power. as we all know, laptops are notorious for not lasting that long on battery!

Bought this card based on the other reviews. Just got it last week. WinXP found and installed it without any problems. Connected my Mini DV camcorder, and was doing movie captures within 10 minutes. Great card for the price, and no annoying dongle.

I just got this product for my iPod, and couldn't be happier. For starters, the FireWire Card is much better than I expected (I received the newer SmartDisk branded card with the plugs directly in the card - no cable). Then, I just plugged it to my Toshiba laptop (running Win2000) and there was nothing else to do, not even waiting for Windows to recognize it! In 30 seconds I was synchronizing my iPod seamlessly.
In short, I fully recommend it.

This card auto-installed ok, and pretended to work, but I had lots of problems making it work with an iPod. Sometimes Win2000 crashed (which it never has before on my laptop), sometimes I got an application-level error saying there's not space left on the iPod. When I replaced this Firewire card with another, everything worked great.

This device would not work on my Wallstreet G3 under 9.2.2. It didn't work on my neighbor's Powerbook G4 under Classic or Jaguar. I reached this conclusion after trying two different units and numerous extension configurations during three weeks of experimentation. I suggest any Powerbook user needing FireWire ports cough up the extra bucks for an Adaptec unit, which Amazon also carries.

Small, does the job, inexpensive. What more do you want?