Firewire daisy chain

G4 in OS 9.2 with FW400.
External HDs with FW400/800.
Obviously I must connect to the G4 with FW400, but can I daisy chain the second HD using FW800 (only one FW400 port on them)?
I suspect not but thought I would check.
Michael
G4 733 512 MB Mac OS 9.2.x

Hi, Michael -
You may be able to do that, if you can locate appropriate adapter cables. However, it may work better to use a firewire hub in order to get additional ports, so that you don't have to experiment with using a FW800 port to connect to a FW400 port.
On the other hand, since your G4 has two FW400 ports (some models have 3 - the third is inside the box), if you have only two firewire devices you can connect each to its own port on the Mac, using only the FW400 ports on the drives.
One of the restrictions on FW400 (and maybe with FW800) is that only the first two devices on each bus can draw power from the firewire bus. I've found that it's in my best interest to invest in external power supplies for each device, as well as an additional power/surge strip to plug them into. Doing so reduces the burden on the Mac's power supply. It may be that some firewire hubs offer supplemental extenal power for the devices connected to them.

Similar Messages

Firewire daisy-chain trouble with Leopard. Will a hub help?

I cannot get reliable daisy-chaining of my external Firewire drives under Leopard. A Firewire drive directly attached to computer will work, but subsequent daisy-chains to this drive will not mount more than half the time. I ended up getting corruption of 2 drives: there appears to sometimes be Spotlight crashes/Finder crashes, and Disk Utility repair failure after a mount fails.
I have nine FW drives, and I like to keep bootable clones of all 3 of my Macs with the current system and a couple of generations back. Being able to attach only one drive to my 12" G4 Powerbook 1.5GHz makes cloning difficult (I can only clone the internal drive using my Powerbook). If I get a Firewire hub, will my FW connection then be reliable? There seems to be a problem in Leopard as I don't get daisy-chain problems using the same drives under Tiger. The drive activity lights don't even flash when the daisy-chained drive mounts fail under Leopard, so it appears that Leopard is making no attempt to mount the drives. Why would this be? Yet sometimes daisy-chain drives have mounted just fine.
Makes/models I have tried: Smartdisk Firelite (were sold by Apple), Maxtor OneTouch III, Seagate FreeAgent Pro, and Iomega Black series. I tried various cables.
Does anyone know what the difference is, from a hardware standpoint, between daisy-chain vs. using a Firewire hub. Would there be an inherent difference using a hub?
Are the "hubs" with Mac Mini footprints actually true hubs or are they daisy-chains? How about FW drives with built-in FW "hubs": are THEY actually a true hub or a daisy-chain in disguise? (Sorry if these questions seem stupid.) Recommendations for a hub?

Sorry just noticed I've probably posted this under the wrong forum header

Firewire daisy chaining .

Hi guys i just bought a focusrite sapphire and it rocks . I have a lacie firewire drive. can i daisy chain the drive with the additional port on the focusrite .
cheers

Yes.

Firewire Daisy Chaining With 400(6pin) and 800(9pin)

I am purchasing the new 17"MBP and it is my first Mac in about 4 years(so glad to get back to Mac because of my work)
Anyway, I want to daisy chain two of my HDDs but I have one 9pin cable for my desktop HDD and one 6pin for my portable HDD. Will this still work fine, or should I just buy another 9pin?
They are both Lacie HDDs and both have 9pin and 6pin.
Also, I have been out of the loop for a while, how many HDDs can you hook up together through firewire without problems. Could you technically hook more up through Firewire 800(saying that all drives are hooked up through 800)
Thanks for the help!

Please see this posting... it was targeted for another topic, but I am sure this response also applies here!
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8922899#8922899
Cheers!
—tonza

Motu firewire daisy chain with logic?

Actually 2 questions:
1. I have a motu 896 HD and a 828. I try to connect these with the firewire ports with no success. aggregate devices? Does not work for me...suggestions?
2. My 896 has main out 1-2 and analog 1-8. In logic the main out occupies 1-2 and analog 1-2 goes to 3-4 and som on... I have a mixing console and it would be much less confusing if the outs from the motu is the same in logic...suggestions?

I have used the same 2 devices as well as an 896HD with an Ultralite, as an aggregate device with no problems. Do this:
Plug the 896HD into your mac with firewire. Plug into the 828 from the 896.
Go to the MOTU device setup, and set the Clock of the 896 to Internal, and the 828 to sync to the 896.
Go to Audio Midi Setup, make new aggregate device, select both units, 896 first then 828 second.
Open logic and select the Aggregate device in the Core Audio Driver preference.
Then you SHOULD with any luck have both units working in logic, it should give you LOADS of inputs in the inputs section of the mixer. You can rename the inputs by either. Going to the Mixer>Options>IO Labels, and selecting "User Name" and inputting what you want it to be called. Or go to the MOTU device setup app, and change the input names there, then in Logic Select "Driver Name" instead.
Hope this helps, it is possible so don't panic.

Firewire Daisy Chaining Problem

I plug in a FW external harddrive into my MBP and it shows up fine. Then i add a device (i have tried this with another HD and a soundcard) onto the HD, and the MBP unmounts the 1st device with the unplugged error. If i have both devices plugged into each other before pluggin into the MBP, nothing shows up. I have tried this with 2 different external drives (1 self powered and the other buss powered) and get the same results on both. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO GET RID OF THE EXTRA FIREWIRE PORT

There would appear to be a bug with Firewire devices that has been persistent throughout 10.5 with multiple Firewire devices attached if they are of a specific firmware. I've even tried to use a Firewire hub with no conclusion in sight. And the company that I bought the devices from claims there is no firmware update, and usually is a company that is quite reliable in terms of Firewire. Plugging them in the two Firewire ports of my iMac Intel Core2Duo White model hasn't made a difference.
WHY DID THEY HAVE TO GET RID OF THE EXTRA FIREWIRE PORT
Using all uppercase won't get anyone's attention any quicker. If anything, it makes it appear as though you are shouting and attempting to be rude.
Apple has feedback pages here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
This is a user to user forum, and while Apple does read the forum, AppleCare and the feedback forums appear to get more attention for actual feedback. Resetting the Firewire port, resetting the power manager, or resetting the PRAM can sometimes improve matters as my FAQ* indicates:
http://www.macmaps.com/firewirebug2.html
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

Has anyone been able to use an Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire to daisy chain a dozen or more FireWire drives?

Ever since I realized that I was not able to connect my FireWire daisy chain to my brand new Retina MBP there has been problems. Four months down the road, I am still unable to use my FireWire drives and have experienced terrible problems whenever I connect my FireWire daisy chain to this new Mac.
I have bought two of these adaptors from Apple now and both do the same thing. The daisy chain has been working perfectly for years with my older MBP and still does! There are no problems until I connect to the new Mac.
I have 15 various hard drives in NewerTech and DatOptics enclosures for over 22 TB. When connected to the new Mac, I would have multiple apps just hang, sometimes just Apple apps, sometimes 3rd party. I will not be able to force quit them and they will keep relauching as you can watch them in the Force Quit window. The Finder will hang and there is no relaunching it. I am having to do a force shutdown twice an hour which leaves no time for work!
After four months of this, now I am being told that Apple will buy back my Mac at full price. But I have basically lost the good part of four month’s worth of work because of constantly fighting the new Mac. This is cost me all my savings and I am about to lose a client. It certainly seems that releasing Thunderbolt1 was a huge, huge mistake.
Does anyone know of any large Fire Wire daisy chain working with Thunderbolt?
TIA,
R

Yes, my first post is all about how darn iffy the adaptors are and I have two of them to return now.
I question your answer because I am betting that four drives that are in one enclosure NOT all RAIDed together as one drive, but as four separate drives that those four drive will count as four devices. The daisy chain that I had going had eight drives in TWO quad boxes, four drives in TWO dual drives and another drive in a single enclosure. A total of five “devices” if you will, but also a total of 13 drives that were usually in this daisy chain.
Both of the Apple branded Thunderbolt to FireWire adaptors chocked BIG TIME on this and it works no problem on my older MBP. You basically can not use a new Mac when you are connected to a daisy chain like this!
Just checked the Apple website and indeed, I can get a new MBP with FireWire 800, just not with the Retina display! I wish that I would have known this five months ago before this all started!

Daisy chain two external drives via Firewire, then connect one via USB to the TC?

Hi,
I have two external drives that have both Firewire and USB ports. My 1st generation 500 gb Time Capsule (maybe all of them?) only has USB ports so up til now, I have connected one or the other drive via USB. (I've tried to connect both to a powered USB hub but one drive has problems showing up. At this point I only use the one drive that shows up and connect it directly with no hub to the Time Capsue.)
My question is: Can I daisy chain the two drives via Firewire and then connect one of them (probably the one that has no problems connecting with USB) to the Time Capsule via USB?
Second, somewhat-related problem...
I don't know why one drive isn't connecting very well when directly connected to the Time Capsule. Both are Fantom drives. One is a 1TB, the one that has prblems connecting is a 250GB. I've tried connecting directly or through a powered hub. The 1B has no problems, the 250 gb won't show up most of the time and disconnects itself fairly quickly if it does connect. I've switched cables; that hasn't helped. The 1TB stays connected most of the time but sometimes it disconnects too. I suspect the Time Capsule just isn't able to deal with external drives so I don't puch it. It would be nice to be able to have both drives accessable through the TC though.
Thanks for any help.
Cheers,
John

Doing some experimentation, connecting the drives directly to the MBP:
- Neither of the two drives Firewire daisy-chained and going through the powered USB hub connected to the MBP mount. I was using old aliases on desktop.*They don't show up on network otherwise. (Each drive self-mounts with both Firewire and USB direct connections.)
*Even after making new aliases, neither drive will mount using their new aliases when directly connected (not through hub) with USB or Firewire (and Thunderbolt adapter.) That's weird.
- Both the 240 gb and the 1TB drives going through powered hub connected to MBP mount by themselves.
- Two drives daisy-chained via Firewire and one drive connected to the MBP via Firewire (and Thunderbolt adapter) self-mount. No surprise there but that doesn't help me as I want to have the drives further away from the MBP and connected to the Time Capsule, which doesn't have a Firewire port anyway...
- All of the USB and the Firewire cables work as does the Thunderbolt adapter. I tested them.
I wonder.... I have a Firewire to what appears to be an Ethernet connector. I wonder if that would be any good. I'm afraid to try it though...

Thunderbolt to firewire adaptor does not work when daisy chaining firewire devices

Hi,
I just purchased the Thunderbolt to firewire adaptor for my new late 2012 iMac.
It works when connecting a single firewire device, but when I daisy chain another drive, the first drive disconnects and nothing mounts.
I am trying a Hitachi G-Raid and a couple of WD My Studio II hard drives. They all work when connected directly to the adaptor, but not when more than one drive if daisy chained with firewire.
Has anyone got firewire daisy-chaining working with a thunderbolt adaptor? (just to clarify I am not refering to thunderbolt daisy chaining, as the adaptor is an end-of-chain thunderbolt device).
Thanks

Yikes, that's sad to hear.
I can't test it, no TB here, but are all these drives self AC powered, ie. no bus powered drives?

How many FW devices can you daisy chain?

Have a new iMac w/ one FW800 port. Need to daisy chain eight FW800 hard drives, two FW400 hard drives, and one FW400 DigiDesign Digi002 ProTools mixing board. I was planning on daisy chaining all the FW800 drives then coming out of the last of those with a FW800 to FW400 cable into the first FW400 drive, daisy chaining to the 2nd FW400 drive, then daisy chain from it into the FW400 ProTools mixing board. I know that's a lot of chaining but at the moment those are the devices I have to work with. I have A LOT of video and audio information I need to retain. Seems to me that I read somewhere about a maximum length a firewire daisy chain could be but haven't found any more reference to it when I just looked. All of the devices have their own power supplies so I don't believe they will be drawing much, if any power from the chain. Anybody know of any problems with this setup?

Thanks for the info.
I've tried several scenarios and combinations what I've found is that I can put all the FW800 drives in a daisy chain then put the 1st FW400 drive in and lastly the Digi002 mixing board (which is FW400). When I try to add to this any more drives I get unpredictable results. I have therefore bough another 2TB external drive and hooked it up through USB 2.0 and copied many files to it from the older FW400 drives as well as the only FW800 drive that ever game me headaches. It should be noted that it is a Western Digital My Book drive. It seems like it would be a great drive having FW800, FW400, and USB 2.0 connections. In practice, however, I have had LOTS of problems both on my Macs and PCs I tried using it on. I recommend strongly that you avoid using any MY Book drives. I'm having better luck with practically any other manufacturer, including what I would normally consider no names like SimpleTech and Buffalo. Those drives seem much more stable.

MacBook Air Thunderbolt-to-FireWire adapter and daisy-chaining external FW drives

Here is my problem—I have a MacBook Air 13" running Mavericks to which I want to attach external FW drive(s). This is easily achievable by using the Thunderbolt-to-FW 800 adapter. And the adapter works great until I try to daisy-chain two external drives. If I attach a second drive to the first one, it immediately unmounts the first drive and I get the 'improperly disconnected drive' warning.
I seem to recall that this was doable in Mountain Lion (about 85% sure). So is this a software or hardware problem? And, to go even deeper into the weeds, my two external FW drives are self-powered (no external power supply). So if I got wall warts for these drives, would it work? Or am I remembering this incorrectly and the adapter never supported daisy-chaining?
The external drives are a pair of G-Tech G-Drive minis, but one is a year to 18-months older than the other one, which means it probably has an older FireWire chipset, but on the other hand, they do mount successfully as self-powered FW 800 drives from a native FW 800 port, or even from a daisy-chain originating from a FW 800 port. Anyone have any suggestions?

I have 4 FW devices chained together and use the TB->FW dongle. They all have power bricks. I have several bus powered devices. Some are quirky, some just don't function, two work reliably. There's no question it is all about how much power they need and TB doesn’t supply enough. Bottom line for me: my bus powered FW drives are soley relegated to use with my last FW equipped computer and when it does they will too.

Only One FireWire Jack on MacBook Pro - will daisy chaining work?

So I installed L8 on my MacBook Pro and put all the Content and GarageBand Loops on my external Lacie drive via Firewire. I also plan to record to the external drive via FireWire. However I also connect my Onyx 1640 to my MacBook Pro via Firewire.
I've only one FireWire Jack on my MacBook Pro but need two. Is there a work around for this? Can I just plug my Onyx into the External HD and only the HD to my Mac? (Is this daisy chaining?)

Daisy chaining as you described is possible with firewire (as long as you have a device with two firewire ports, of course!), but too much I/O and you can saturate the firewire bus. (How often this happens in reality, I don't know. Anyone?)
If your MacBook Pro has an express card slot, a solution might be to buy a firewire express card/34. That way, you can have the audio interface on the firewire bus, and the hard drive on the separate express card bus. I also think most of the firewire express cards come with TWO inputs, so you'll even get an extra.

How many firewire drives can I daisy chain on the mac mini

How many firewire g-drives can I daisy chain on my mac mini

edalexjr wrote:
How many firewire g-drives can I daisy chain on my mac mini
From personal experience, if they are bus powered portable drives,
the answer is none. For what ever reason, they are draw a lot of
power and are probably near the edge of the bus powering specs.
Then again, these were the fastest of all the portable FW drives that
I have (Iomega and Seagate being the others), which may have
something to do with it.
I had also noticed an issue with them even with USB. Plugging one
into the Mini or even a powered USB hub would be fine, but 2 would cause
both to be inaccessible, unless I used a couple of USB "Y" cables
that would distribute the power across other ports.
If they are externally powered, you could string a bunch.

Daisy chaining a FireWire drive

I just bought a new 21.5 inch iMac, and I'm in the process of setting it up. I noticed it has one 800 FireWire port. I have a Pro Tools DigiRack with only 400 ports. I have an 800/400 cable, so I'll be able to connect it, and a seperate external hard drive with 800 ports.
What I'm wondering is if it would be better to daisy chain the DigiRack off of the external hard drive and connect the drive to the iMac, or connect the Digirack to the iMac with an 800/400 cable, and run the external drive off of the Digirack? I'm curious if one way would be more efficient than the other, and also if the hard drive could handle the DigiRack feeding off of it.
If I haven't totally confused everyone, I'd appreciate any thoughts.

Hi
Sorry to jump on this topic, but I have a query about the same thing. I need to run a firewire 800 external drive with a firewire 400 dv camera daisy chained to it from my MBP. What happens to the read speeds when daisy chaining externals? does it drop dramatically e.g by half if using two externals on the same port? My only other option is to use the external drive with USB2. but the drive is the priority! would that be faster than daisychaining on a FW800 port?

Daisy-chain Firewire 800 versus USB

Hi. I have an external drive (drive A) connected to my MPB via Firewire 800. I have my iTunes media library on this drive (movies, TV shows, music etc). When I watch a movie on my Apple TV, the content is being streamed from this drive via my MBP to the Apple TV. This works fine.
I also have a second external drive (drive B) that I use only as a back-up for drive A. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up drive A onto drive B. I can connect drive B in one of two ways: Option #1 is to connect drive B directly to my MBP via USB (USD 2.0). This is how I currently have it connected. Option #2 is to connect drive B to drive A via a Firewire 800 cable, daisy-chaining the two drives.
Two questions:
1. Which option will give me better performance when backing up drive A to drive B?
2. If I am watching a movie on Apple TV (streaming from drive A) at the same time that I am backing up drive A to drive B, will option #2 affect streaming of the movie?
Thank you

Have you Shut down your Mac and disconnected your firewire cable from both ends and let it sit about ten minutes then reconnect and try. Also, it is important to disconnect the AC power to your Mac, this helps to reset the FireWire port(s).
Have you checked to see if Disk Utility sees it/ can mount it?
Do you have TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior, both of which you could use to try to mount it.
It is also possible that you have a bad cable or a bad port, do other FW devices work?
-mj

Firewire daisy chain

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