FireWire Depot announced on Wednesday the arrival of four new products: the FireWire 800 CardBus PCMCIA adapter (US$89.99), the 3-port FireWire 800 repeater/hub ($89.99), the 3-port FireWire 800 PCI card adapter ($67.99) and the FireWire 800/USB 2.0 combo to IDE bridge board ($84.95). The CardBus PCMCIA adapter features two 9-pin FireWire 800 ports, one 6-pin FireWire 400 port and a DC input power connector. It comes with one FireWire 400 cable and one FireWire 800 cable, requiring Mac OS 9.x or Mac OS 10.x for the former and Mac OS X v10.2.4 or higher for the latter. The adapter also works only with an open 32-bit CardBus slot.
The 3-port FireWire 800 repeater/hub is backward compatible with FireWire 400 devices if you use a 9-to-6-pin cable or adapter. It’s powered by the FireWire bus but also comes with an external power supply; system requirements call for Mac OS 8.6 or higher, including Mac OS X. Meanwhile, the 3-port FireWire 800 PCI card adapter offers two 9-pin FireWire 800 ports and one 6-pin FireWire 400 port and ships with the necessary internal power cables. It features built-in FireWire 400 driver support that’s compatible with Mac OS 8.6 through Mac OS X v10.2.3 and built-in FireWire 800 driver support that works with Mac OS X v10.2.4 or higher.
Finally, the FireWire 800/USB 2.0 combo to IDE bridge board allows two master and slave IDE drives — including CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, tape drives and hard drives — to be connected to a USB 2.0 or FireWire serial bus. One drive can be hot-swapped even while the other is in use. The kit comes with the bridge board, an Ultra DMA100 18-inch cable for the two IDE devices, a 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire Cable, a bilingual-to-bilingual FireWire 800 cable, an A-to-mini B type USB 2.0 cable and a Y-shape DC power cable. System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.x, and FireWire Depot notes that this kit is also available in a larger form factor by special order, so contact the company if you’re interested.