It won't work for firewire to talk to the empeg (not with a firewire->ide adaptor, at least); however, with some extra circuitry you could soft-switch the drive between the empeg and the firewire adaptor - but your PC would then have to deal with the ext2 filesystem (etc).

The IDE bus is the best (only?) way to fairly painlessly add I/O to the empeg, though.

Hugo