Jay,
I have two firewire cables connected, one is permanently connected to a DV deck, the other lies on my desk, so I can connect any camera for capturing. Obviously, all DV material is captured with the deck.
If you need more firewire connectors, you could install either a PCI card with 3 x 1394A, or a PCI-X card with 1 x 1394A and 2 x 1394B connectors. However, with the hot-swappable disks I don’t think that is necessary.
Hope this helps.
Harm Millaard