Fireface / Laptop / External Hard Drive Options

Greetings!

I have just purchased a laptop that is now hooked up to my Fireface 800 via the laptop's single on-board 4-pin firewire port (using a 4-pin to 6-pin cable). Everything works fine (the laptop's chipset is Texas Instruments, which I have been told is the least problematic).

Now I would like to hook up an external drive to record to...which brings me to my question(s), and I need some advice from people who may have already gone through this.

I have a Western Digital internal SATA drive that I would like to put in an external enclosure (to save money)...I was thinking about buying a PCMCIA eSATA card to hook up to a eSATA enclosure (with the aforementioned SATA drive inside). The PCMCIA slot on the laptop shares the same Texas Instruments chipset as the firewire. Is this a problem?

Or should I just find a SATA to firewire enclosure and daisy-chain it off the Fireface? If so, would I need some sort of 800 to 400 adapter?

I realize that I can easily hook up a USB to SATA enclosure, but I was told that USB enclosures kill performance...I don't want that (up to this point, I have been using a desktop with firewire 800 ports connecting both the Fireface and external LaCie hard drives).


Here's a link to my laptop's specs (I've actually got 2gb of memory)

http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/Q10 … Rsp2.shtml


Thanks for any help at all!

Matt