Asus P5Q-E shared eSata Firewire bus?

Hi, I am using an Asus P5Q-E mobo

I have the E-sata hooked to my backup external hard drives Venus T5 and the Firewire hooked up to my audio interface Focusrite pro 40

Now I keep having the feeling that one is slowing down the other. Either the hard drives arent working as fast or the audio interface ASIO drivers gives me pops and clicks. Is it possible that in this motherboard they are sharing the same bus and I am experiencing a bottleneck?

If so, would a separate Firewire\eSata card solve this problem? Would appreciate any help on this weird issue.

have tested the drives with the fw disconnected, i mean using something like hdtune or atto to bench? then plug back in the fw and try it agian. a cheaper means to solving the problem if it only happens with that Esata connection. is to buy a internal sata to Esata bracket, then plug into the intel ICH.

from looking over the specs of the board, i cant find the chipset used for fw support. i found that the esata port is using the Marvell 88SE6121 but doesnt do fw and is using a pcie x1 connection onboard. there should be no way the fw is effecting the sata or vise verse in this case.

it is gonna take some testing to see if they are or are not effecting each other. though im going to have to say they cant be effecting each other. now the same DMA/IRQ might be assigned to both and that might be the problem. which is a os issue not hw issue when it comes to resource allocation.

Disconnect the hard drive and see if you still get pops and clicks. If you still get the pops and clicks with the drive disconnected, there is your issue. If you still have the issues, then there is something else going on. You can also do what Evilsizer suggested as for seeing what your hard drive speed is.