Firewire 800 add-on card acting strangely? (slowed down by onboard firewire)

[jackcklam]

I wanted to use my firewire 800 hard drives at their full speed, so I bought a add-on firewire 800 PCI-express card to run on my Asus P5B Deluxe.

It is a Siig PCIe card (2 FW800 + 1 FW400 port)

 

It works instantly out of the box in OS X. But it only connects to my hard drives in Firewire 400 mode when my onboard firewire port is enabled in BIOS. System profiler shows the connection speed at FW800 when onboard firewire is disabled.

 

I though I can simply not use onboard firewire and use the firewire 800 card solely. But the problem is, all the drives connected to the firewire800 card stop working whenever my DV camera is connected to the same card. The drives just keep flashing rapidly and they are no longer accessible.

 

I can enable my onboard firewire port just for the DV camera, but I don't want to slow down my firewire800 to 400.

 

1) Have you experienced similar situation? Any way to solve the problem and have each firewire controller operate independently?

 

OR

 

2) Is there any way to make the firewire800 card work properly with my DV camera?

 

 

 

thanks,

 

Jack