What are the advantages of installing a firewire card on a computer?

You can use Fire Wire devices, obviously.


The most useful thing being done with firewire is probably capturing digital video from video cameras (like those used for home videos and such). Then you can edit it, put it on DVD's, put it on Youtube, whatever.
What are the advantages of installing a firewire card on a computer?
Firewire has a slightly quicker data transfer than USB and for certain types of interfaces there is less latency. Especially in audio from what I've noticed. If you are not a person who is really demanding of your computer then you shouldn't worry about it. But if you have a lot of usb instruments and devices that you use that have a lot of latency issues then I'd suggest it.





For instance I run an external soundcard and i plug in my guitar through a mixer to record it into my computer and I also want to be wearing headphones to monitor what I am doing, well from the strum of the string the signal has to go through my mixer, then through my soundcard, then into my computer be recorded and loop all the way back to my headphones and before with a usb soundcard I would get a noticeable and disturbing delay that would make it almost impossible for me to play something decent and know it sounded alright. Now the delay is short enough with my firewire interface is not really even noticeable.





I don't know the actual data transfer specs between usb 2.0 and firewire and which one is technically faster, but for what I do, my firewire device works way better. I also have tons of USB stuff I still use though. USB is perfectly fine for most things I use other than my soundcard.
What are the advantages of installing a firewire card on a computer?
nothing. i have one built into board and never used it.