Connect 2 external drives to 1 firewire port?

MacBook Pro 5 4 Mid-2009 15"
has 1 firewire port
1 USB 2.0 port with 2 more USB 2.0 ports on an external monitor
I've been running Time Machine on a 500 GB LaCie d2 quadra external drive and need to upgrade, probably to a 3 TB drive.
To transfer my backups from the old drive to the new one, I need to connect both to the MacBook. Can I connect both in a daisy chain to the FireWire port? Or do I have to connect one via USB and the other via FireWire?
Thanks.

You can either use a FireWire hub or connect one device through USB. If either drive has two or more FireWire ports, it can act as a hub.
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I assumed that a FireWrire port was standard like USB.
It is, just not on the aluminum Macbook.
It can be done with USB, but it is slower and less reliable.
The hard drive is fairly easy to remove on the aluminum Macbook. I would remove it and install it in an external Firewire enclosure temporarily to transfer your files quickly and reliably, then put the drive back in the Macbook.
Firewire allows two operating modes. One is asynchronous, like USB which suffers from latency, bus contention and collisions.
The other is isochronous mode, and it lets a device carve out a certain dedicated amount of bandwidth that other devices can't touch. It gets a certain number of time slices each second all its own. The advantages for audio/video should be obvious: that stream of data can just keep on flowing, and as long as there isn't more bandwidth demand than the wire can handle, nothing will interfere with it. No collisions, no glitches.

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Connect 2 external drives to 1 firewire port?

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