Can't daisy-chain Firewire drives reliably from 1-port Powerbook. Hub??

I have found that I cannot get a daisy-chained Firewire drive to mount more than 50% of the time. This problem doesn't happen with Tiger with the same drives. I have tried 4 different brands of late-model Firewire drives (Iomega, Smartdisk, Maxtor, and Seagate) with different cables and what happens is that a drive that is directly attached to the 12" Powerbook will mount, but the second chained drive fails to mount a majority of the time. Since I only have one Firewire port, this is preventing me from using more than one drive at a time, and I lost two Firewire drives to corruption today. Three out of four partitions lost contained bootable backups of Leopard and Tiger. Ouch!
This issue could prevent from using Leopard with my Powerbook, which is supposed to be Leopard-compatible. I can't remake the clones too easily with only being able to attach one drive at a time. I am thinking I will order a Firewire hub and try that, but I am not sure if that would be a solution, and I am wondering why I can always daisy-chain under Tiger, and not under Leopard. Does anyone have experience with Firewire hubs and Firewire operation details? Will I be able to get reliable Firewire with a hub?

I have exactly the same problem !
I have found this :
Using Multiple FireWire Devices at the Same Time
Power Macintosh computers can transfer perfect digital video (DV) on FireWire when no other devices are using the FireWire bus. If you have problems transferring digital video, make certain that no other FireWire devices are being used at the same time. Turning on a DV camera that is already connected may cause a FireWire hard disk to stop working. If this happens, turn off the camera and verify that the hard disk has recovered. Then unplug the FireWire cable from the camera, turn the camera on, and reconnect the FireWire cable to the camera. Check with the hard disk vendor for a possible firmware update to prevent this problem.
here:
http://www.2ndwave.com/firewire.asp
At the moment I can't upset what I'm doing to test it but I intend to do that as soon as I finish copying transferring...
I have the following device attached to different firewire ports:
a firewire video device connecting my G5 Desktop to the TV screen
a firewire ibot
I thought I would give u a head start

Similar Messages

HT5299 Can 2 daisy-chained firewire-800 drives be connected to 1 Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter?

Can 2 daisy-chained firewire-800 drives be connected to 1 Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter?

Nightwatch (NL) wrote:
Thanks Steve!
One more question: Stayed throughput speeds more or less the same as original Firewire (since all my movies are on external disks) or has it become significantly slower?
I haven't done a careful side by side quantitative comparison of what I had on the older Macbook Pro (which had three Firewire800 disks chained together via FW800) versus the new Macbook Pro (which has thunderbolt into which I have connected three FW800 drives daisy chained via the adaptor), mainly because my employer supplied me with these computers and required I turn in the old one when they replenished it with the new one. However, I can say this -- one of the FW800 externals is used for Time Machine, another for making entire disk clones, and the third is for misc storage. I have seen Time Machine start up during a disk clone (with SuperDuper) and there seems to be no impact. The disk cloning is generally pretty intensive on disk and cpu resources, but thunderbolt seems to have a much bigger capacity for throughput than firewire and hence can apparently accommodate multiple streams of FW800 data going back and forth with no apparent impact on each other. The main limit seems to be the FW800 speed itself, not thunderbolt. I see ~ 60 MB/s or more which is as much as I have ever seen on FW800. Ultimately, the ideal setup will be thunderbolt drives daisy chained together, I would expect hundreds of MB/s, but I don't see many of these thunderbolt drives on the market yet. Even better would be solid state drives ...

Can You Daisy Chain Firewire 400 and 800 Mixed?

I would like to purchase an External Drive. I'm looking at a FW800. What I'm wondering is, Can I daisy chain devices mixed in.
I Want to run a FW800 Bilingual cable from my Powerbook to the External Enclosure. From the Ext. Enclosure, I'd like to have take my second FW800 port and take a cable that converts Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 and plug in another item. Is this possible?
Can I mix and match FW devices using separate protocol in a daisy chain configuration?

Russ,
Yes, it is possible. I have a drive that works on FW800, FW400, or USB2. Connected to the second FW800 port on that, I have an adaptor cable, a FW400 cable to a FW400 drive, and another FW400 drive connected to that . All 3 drives are on the desktop of my PowerBook. When I read your post, I had the only first drive connected to the iBook with USB2.
The only problem I've run into was trying to copy a 200G drive on FW800 to a 250G drive on the FW400 port on the PowerBook. Working overnight, it managed to copy ONE Gigabyte! I hooked them up as they are now, and copied the whole shebang in about 45 minutes
I picked up an empty drive case, 800/400/USB2 combo from OWC and a 250G Maxtor drive at CompUSA for about $100 less than I could get a 250 FW800 drive anyplace. http://www.macsales.com

Can i daisy chain external drives

I have 3 drives but only 2 800 wire ports. Can I daisy chain, or use a 400 wire?

daisy chaining should work fine. I used to have about 11 drives chained (which was pushing the envelope - but it worked with dv material). If at all possible, avoid firewire 400 as it will reduce your thruput.

Daisy Chain Firewire Drives

I have a FW 800 drive connected to my Mac Mini.
I am trying to daisy chain a FW 400 drive to the FW 800 drive but the 400 drive won't mount.
I have a cable that allows me to plug the FW400 directly into the FW 800 port on the computer and it mounts fine when I do that.
Any suggestions?
Thanks

On many drives, the two FW ports are interchangeable, but that may not be the case with your drive if it actually has "IN" and "OUT" labels.
The next test I would try is connecting only the FW-800 drive to the computer, using the "OUT" port. If it fails, you won't know whether you have an intentional asymmetry or a defective port, but if it works, then you can try adding the FW-400 drive dasiychained to the "IN" port.

Can i daisy chain external drives and use multiple disks for my iTunes libraries

It's amazing how much content you can acquire. I've filled my 2TB external drive with content. I purchased another drive and daisy chained them. How do I get additional uploads to automatically go to the new drive? Itunes is indicating that the drive is "full".
Please help! I've got 6 downloads effectively "paused"

No, sorry, Time Machine can only back up to a single volume.
Short of getting a larger disk, your best bet is to back up one drive (probably the OSX drive) with Time Machine, and use a different app to back up the other one to a different drive. See the green box in Time Machine - Frequently Asked Question #27 for some suggestions.

External firewire drive damage from bad port?

After plugging my LaCie 200 Gb firewire external drive into a PC, I can no longer mount it on my mac. Plugging it in freezes access to other attached firewire devices, which recover after it is unplugged. A second drive was damaged in the same way by the PC.
Would a bad firewire card/port in the PC cause this?
Is there any way to repair the damaged external drives?

Yes it is bus powered although given their sub-note I wouldn't use any other bus powered FireWire device at the same time as this drive.
As for installing applications of an external drive, yes you can. It is not recommended that you move Apple applications to anywhere other than where they are installed to. In any case, if an installer gives you the choice then go for it.

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.

Mac Mini 2009 - Can't daisy chain two FW800 drives

I have two FW800 enclosures with 3.5-inch drives and external power.
Each one mounts individually when connected to the Mini FW800 port but when I daisy-chain them the second one in the chain doesn't mount and is not seen by disk utility.
Those enclosures use an Oxford UF934DSB chipset.
What's ironic that I had a FW400 enclosure daisy chained to one FW800 enclosure until this afternoon and that daisy-chain worked fine.
Somewhere on the net there was an article that the daisy-chaining had to be done in a certain sequence, ie Mac FW to top FW port on first external, then from bottom of first FW enclosure to top of second and so forth.
I always though the FW ports were just wired in parallel.
Well, this is interesting - since these new FW800 enclosures also have one FW400 port as well, I just connected the second one using the FW400 ports and now they both mount.
But now the whole chain only runs at FW400 speeds.
Anyone else come across this problem or better yet, what is the solution to get both daisy-chained FW800 drives to mount.
The enclosures are Rosewell, the drive in each a 1.5 TB WD green.

I don't think it has anything to do with the power supply.
The two enclosures are identical and react (work or not) exactly the same when I interchange them or the FW cable.
They also work flawlessly if I connect the second one using FW400 instead of FW800. Would just trying to get the enclosure to mount with FW800 draw more current than when mounting with FW400 to put the power brick over the edge? I doubt it.
A few other things I'm going to try - I do this when I have a few extra minutes since I can't afford to spend my time on this continuously.
1. See if there is a F'W update for the enclosure and/or the Oxford chip.
2. Talk to the Oxford and enclosure support people
3. Update to 10.6.4, I'm on 10.6.2 right now
4. Do a bit more digging on the net to see how others got the FW800 daisy-chaining working.
The two enclosures react the same when I try each one separately and also when I switch them around. Whatever the problem is, it affects both equally so it's not some defect on one of them.
With the rest of the testing I have done, I'm now pretty sure it's a Mac software problem.
Although I would have thought someone else would have this problem as well but I can't even find any discussion on daisy-chaining with this chipset when running OS 10.6.
There is a 15-digit number in disk utility called connection ID.
I assume that is the Firewire ID number that some threads I read refer to.
That ID is the same for the two FW800 ports and the FW400 port on each enclosure but it's different for the two enclosures, so some conflict there is definitely not the issue.
So far I couldn't find what the latest issue of firmware is for the Oxford chip set, but I copied all the information that comes up with the firewire hardware listing so when I find the information I can check it against the firmware issue on my two units.
Now, another interesting tidbit - some people say they had to power up the enclosure a few times occasionally to get a single drive to mount.
I never had that problem, a single FW800 drive always mounted right away, but I decided to try that with the daisy-chained drive.
So I turned the power switch on that second drive off and then on again...and lo and behold - doesn't it mount now........
But that is not the interesting tidbit........the tidbit is when I check back in the Mini Firewire hardware listing.
Whereas before it showed all the expected detail with either drive when connected individually via FW800, now with both FW800 drives connected I get this:
*FireWire Bus:*
*Warning: Unable to list FireWire devices.*
*Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec*
....and oooops - both FW800 drives just disconnected by themselves.
Sure seems to point to a Mac software issue.
And if you google for "Warning: Unable to list FireWire devices." you get pages of hits - many on Leopard but also a fair share on SL.
I updated the software to 10.6.4 - still the same problem.
Daisy-chain with FW400 is fine, with FW800 the second drive in the chain - doesn't matter which one it is, won't mount.

Can I daisy chain IDE and SATA drives w/ FW400?

I have an 250GB IDE drive in ann ext enclosure with two Firewire 400 ports. Can I daisy chain a SATA drive to this or does it have to be another IDE drive?

If both are in their own Firewire case then yes. The FW interface converts whatever internal interface it is so the computer only sees it as a FW device.
George

Does daisy chaining Firewire 800 drives reduce performance?

Hello,
Based on the recommendation of a very knowledgable Apple Cert. Instructor, I learnt that a very good drive configuration for editing in FCPX is to have 3 separate drives: Boot disk, Events, and Projects. The reason, I suppose, for having the Events and Projects folders on separate drives is because FCPX is constanty reading and writing data into those 2 databases, which would mean that having both databases on one drive strains performance since the drive would have to write all edit changes constantly in the projects folder while reading video footage constantly from the events folder.
That sounds logical so I'll accept it as being true, but here's the intro to my question: I have an iMac (see the specs below) with 1 firewire 800 port, and my extra 2 drives would need to be daisy chained (FW800) to share the 1 port.
1. Does the communication to the two drives suffer for being daisy chained into 1 port, i.e. is the 800Mb/s transfer rate halved between the 2 drives or is full 800 to both at the same time?
2. Does the computer handle the communication with the 2 FW drives via that 1 port evenly so that I takes full advantage of having separate physical disks dedicated to just reading and writing Media and Project data?
It might seem riduculous to go to such Media Management extremes, but FCPX seems to struggle when I get deep into a project and the performance gets sluggish. that's why I'm trying to optimize the workflow.
Thank you,
Reynaldo
System specs: 27" iMac (mid 2010) 2.8Ghz quad-core i5, 8GB RAM, ATI Radeon 5750 with 1GB GDDR5 Memory
External Drives: LaCie D2 Quadra 2TB 7200RPM and Lacie D2 Quadra 3TB 7200RPM

If all the devices in the chain are FW800 then there will be no degradation.
If any of the devices in the chain are FW400 then complete chain drops to FW400 performance.
Allan

Daisy-chain internal drives temporarily???

Hello! So after a western digital 1TB external drive failed on me I am looking to recover the data on my own. I have taken out the drives from external casing. Call them DRIVE A. I would like to daisy chain them through my iMac's current internal drive which we'll call DRIVE B. I have no need to copy the data from A to B. I just want to be able to get my computer to recognize A as another internal just temporarily so I can copy it all thru to a NEW external fire wire drive, DRIVE C.
So the goal is to just copy the data on DRIVE A to DRIVE C via a Drive B.
I have never daisy chained internal drives before and would really appreciate the communities guidance on accomplishing this. Thank you!

You should not open up your iMac, when there are far easier ways to do what you desire.
1. You can get an empty external drive (either FireWire or USB 2.0 or one that has both interfaces). Put A in that case. Copy off the data to B. Swap out A for C. Copy off the data from B to C.
2. You can get one of these USB to IDE/SATA adapters for $30.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/U2NV2SPATA/
Connect A to this adapter and connect to USB. Connect your new external drive with C to FireWire. Copy off data from A to C. You don't need the intermediate copy on B.

Daisy Chaining Firewire HDs

I now have a Lacie D2 1TB hooked up to my sole Firewire 800 input, If I get another identical Lacie, would it be OK to use the 1st one for Timemachine as I do now, and hook another to it for data? As of now I have the Lacie patitioned into 3 parts....500 Gig for TM, 150 for a SuperDuper backup and 250 for other data...Another possibility is to use the USB output of the HD instead, but wouldn't it be slower? All opinions are welcome

To address an earlier comment you made. You can not hook up a drive to your Mac with Firewire then daisy chain other drives off that drive's USB ports. There isn't a Firewire to USB bridge in there. You are either using Firewire or you are using USB. Which ever one you are NOT using is a dead bus on the drive.
As to moving your iTunes to the external...
Assuming you use the iTunes default settings where iTunes copied added items to your iTunes folder and organizes your library (meaning - everything is all self contained in the iTunes folder), then all you have to do is drag & drop your iTunes folder (not just the iTunes Music folder you find inside the iTunes folder) to the external drive and copy the entire thing.
If you want to test that it worked or would like to actually start using it from that location instead, use these instructions when you start iTunes to point it to the new location...
How to open an alternate iTunes Library file or create a new one
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304447
If you are just testing, then close iTunes after you verify it works, and restart iTunes again with the same instructions and point it back to your internal drive (original) location.
Cheers,
Patrick

Daisy-Chained External Drive No Longer Mounting

I have two external hard drives daisy-chained (firewire 800) to my iMac. The hard drive directly connected my iMac mounts fine. The daisy-chained hard drive no longer mounts, after mounting perfectly fine for a few months. I've tried restarting, etc with no success. Any help would be appreciated.

moretoexplore wrote:
No, it does not mount directly. I did however try using the other hard drive's power cord and it mounted without problem. But this doesn't fix the problem.. only one drive is mounting. At least it seems I have ruled out a more serious problem with the drive itself. I'm contacting Lacie to get a new power cord. Hopefully, with a new power cord, this will resolve the issue and it isn't some sort of daisy-chain issue.
I think you have solved the problem by elimination.
You can prove that it's the power cord by using the "bad" one on the working drive. If it stops working, it's guaranteed to be the power cord.
I believe that there were some issues with some of the LaCie Power Supplies.
Message was edited by: nerowolfe

I have a Mac Pro tower with two internal Hard Discs, each one 2TB. I purchased a 3TB Time Capsule. But it does not allow me to back up because it says there is not enough back up space available. Between the two HDs there are 3.3TBs. Can I daisy chain TC?

I have a Mac Pro tower (OSX version 10.6.3) with two internal Hard Drives, each one 2TB.
I purchased a 3TB Time Capsule. But cannot back up because it tells me there is not enough space.
I have more than 3Tbs to store to the new TC.
Can I daisy chain two TCs to store the 4TBs?
How can I back up only the internal HD that is already full, without backing up the other one?
How can I do back up using Time Machine to back up the 3.5Tbs?
Do I need to purchase another external HD (that is not TC) to be able to back up all of my photos?

Can I daisy chain two TCs to store the 4TBs?
No, you cannot link to produce a single large partition.
But you can have two separate backup jobs.. and use each partition. That is hard on TM but you can easily get a different backup software for it.
How can I back up only the internal HD that is already full, without backing up the other one?
In TM you do a different setup and exclude the other drive.
But it is better to use an alternative software IMHO.
How can I do back up using Time Machine to back up the 3.5Tbs?
You would need to use a network drive of more than 4TB .. it would also take forever. This is just wrong way to do it. Although you can buy a NAS that will work with Time Machine and load it with disks 16TB is possible.. if you can get a second mortgage.. the fragile nature of TM on 3rd party devices.. would leave me in cold sweat if anything went wrong.
TM is excellent at keeping incremental backups of files that keep changing.. as such you should use TM to backup your OS disk and main user directory.. exclude all files and directories that never change. Back them up separately.
Do I need to purchase another external HD (that is not TC) to be able to back up all of my photos?
Yes, that is a much better idea. You want to store photos safely and you want to store them in multiple places. If you have multiple TB of photos, dedicate a couple of disks to the backup. ie have at least two copies.. not in backup format.. in straight copy format if possible.. so you can keep one of the disks offsite.
I would be using your MacPro internal disk access, to place the disk onto sata bus and do the copy disk to disk direct. Or even buy esata card.. or sata to esata converter cable so you can use esata box. That will beat any other transfer speed except thunderbolt for which you would need third mortgage. (The MORT in mortgage is significant).
The great jurist Sir Edward Coke, who lived from 1552 to 1634, has explained why the term mortgage comes from the Old French words mort, "dead," and gage, "pledge." It seemed to him that it had to do with the doubtfulness of whether or not the mortgagor will pay the debt.

Can't daisy-chain Firewire drives reliably from 1-port Powerbook. Hub??

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