Daisy chaining firewire problems

Hello. So i'm working on a project where the client has 15 4TB firewire drives filled with footage. I've been working with all of them daisy chained together. As you can probably guess, this is causing some issues. Some days I can come in and work for hours and have no crashes. some days, like today, it's hard to even get all 15 drives to mount without the firewire bus crashing and all of the drives unmounting. It's been getting shorter and shorter between crashing episdoes.
They have 7 Lacies, 6 WD's and 2 G-techs. I'm wondering if anyone knows a) if there's an optimal order to put these drives in based on manufacturer, b) if a firewire hub would be any help in this situation, c) any other solutions that wouldn't cost much that could help to make it run more smoothly.
This happens whether it's on a Mac Pro tower (latest Snow Leopard update) or on my MBP 17" (10.5.8)
Anybody done work with lots of drives daisy chained or know any other ways to work with this stuff? thank you...

ApptrGy wrote:
Same Problem. Just got the newest imac i7 from the previous years model, and now my FW 800 drives dont daisy chain, and kick each other off. Worked with the previous model no problem. Major pain not being able to have all the drives mount up together. Any solutions yet with this FW problem?
It's not the same problem and it's not a Firewire issue. You have too much data and too many signals for a single FW bus to handle which is why we recommend editing on the big Macs for anything beyond DV-size codecs. You cannot add an additional FW bus to the iMac.
bogiesan

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    I have exactly the same problem !
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    here:
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    Can 2 daisy-chained firewire-800 drives be connected to 1 Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter?

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