adding more I/O

  after doing a quick search and not seeing any relevant topics less than 2 years old...and not expecting much to have changed, I'd like to get opinions, based on today's hardware... I have a Tascam fw-1082, it's old, I know, but still works perfectly with Sonar X2(the rest of my DAW specs are in my sig), I have no desire to replace it, but I want more inputs. Ideally, I'd like to drop $300ish on a rackmount interface, firewire or usb 2.0/3.0 with 8 rear facing xlr inputs(have an 8x snake, so I'd like them all to be near each other), decent pre's and phantom power, to add and play nicely with my fw-1082 in X2. Hopefully without having to do any strange workarounds or asio4all... I know clock syncing is a potential issue. I've read that the fw-1082 cannot daisy chain other fw devices, nor should you run 2 fw interfaces off one fw card. I'd like to know if anyone can refute either of these claims... I know I'll have to run in WDM mode. I had been running it in asio and it works great, but just for the hell of it I tried it in WDM mode and honestly didn't see much difference...as far as I can tell it works equally well, more or less, in either mode. Another option, granted a more expensive one, would be to get a new interface that has as many inputs as I'll need(thinking 12-16) and use that exclusively for inputs, and just use the fw1082 as a control surface and possibly monitoring............. For some reason it's not saving my formatting, sorry for the big block of words