Daisy chain an external drive

Just set up new iMac with a 2TB external Lacie drive, partitioned for Time Machine and SuperDuper, and connected with Firewire 800.
I want to also use my old 500GB Lacie external drive for temporarily holding unedited movies, whilst I work on them in Final Cut or iMovie.
Can I connect the old external drive to the new external drive using a Firewire 400 cable and without adversely effecting my set-up?
Looking ahead, is it true that there will be Thunderbolt adaptors to enable a second or third Firewire 800 connection(s)?
Would the above options be preferable to a Firewire Hub?
All views appreciated.

tom lawrence wrote:
I want to also use my old 500GB Lacie external drive for temporarily holding unedited movies, whilst I work on them in Final Cut or iMovie.
Yes as long as both are self powered, then daisy chaining them should not be a problem. If one drive is bus powered (not self powered) then it should be connect to a powered drive at the end of the chain, instead of into the iMac or mid chain where 3 or more drives are chained together.
FireWire: Frequently Asked Questions
tom lawrence wrote:
Can I connect the old external drive to the new external drive using a Firewire 400 cable and without adversely effecting my set-up?
Yes a FireWire 400 drive can be plugged into the 400 port of a 800 External Hard Drive (if so equipped) or into the spare FireWire 800 port by using either a 6 to 9 adapter or 6 to 9 FireWire cable.
Amazon.com: elago FireWire 400 to 800 Adapter for Mac: Electronics
Amazon.com: Tripp Lite F017-006 IEEE 1394b Firewire 800 Gold Hi-speed Cable, 9pin/6pin - 6ft: Electronics
NewerTech FIR1369AD 9-pin (FW800) to 6-pin (FW400)... in stock at OWC
NewerTech 1394B96036 FireWire 800/400 1394B/A 9 Pin... in stock at OWC
Dennis

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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...

Daisy-Chaining Firewire External Drive Tips Needed here!

H, I have three cases with drives in them I want to connect to my iMac for various duty:
1) fw/400/800/esata/usb case (externally-powered)
2) fw/400/usb case (externally-powered)
3) fw/400/esata/usb case (bus-powered)
My current setup is to chain 1 & 2, and plug that chain into the firewire 800 port on the imac, and 3 is just plugged into one of the USB ports on the back of the iMac.
Is this the best way to do this? I am concerned that by chaining 2 to 1, that I am slowing down the fw800 drive inside 1. Is that true? Well, thx for any tips

I'll agree with *"a brody"* my gut say's 1 to the 800 port, 2 to the 400 port with 3 daisy chained to 2, how ever it might depend on what your using each drive for.
Open your Activity Monitor and select the Disk Activity tab, then by copying the same size file or folder to each drive you should get some idea of the transfer speed to each drive. You can also use this method to check the speed when copying between External HD's. (Note: for testing sustained transfer speeds use at least a 1GB or even better a 10GB file or folder)

My new iMac will not allow me to daisy chain my external hard drives - what can I do?!

I just purchased the new late 2013 iMac 27" and all is wonderful except it will NOT allow me to daisy chain my external hard drives which is a HUGE problem because I'm a professional photographer & I won't be able to access my images unless I can sort this out. I know I can purchase a new giant hard drive but i'd prefer not to because I have about 12 TB of data which will be expensive & time consuming to transfer & I'd also prefer not to have that much info tied into one device. Ultimately I will need to get a Drive with multiple bays but I'd really like a short term solution that works for the drives I currently have. Any help is GREATLY appreciated! Thanks!!

Why can't you daisy chain your drives. If it's because the iMac only has a Thunderbolt port and you have Firewire drivers purchase the Thunderport to Firewire adaptor from Apple: Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter - Apple Store (U.S.)
OT

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 ...

Daisy chaining Firewire 800 drives

I am considering daisy-chaining a pair of WD My Passport Studio drives off my mid-2007 iMac's Firewire port.
I'm already using one of these drives for my data, having replaced the internal HDD with an SSD. I'm about to buy a second drive to replace an old and noisy USB drive for Time Machine backups. Will I get decent performance from this daisy-chained FW setup (Im guessing that I should, at 800 mb/s full duplex).
FYI, the WD My Passport Studio drives are FireWire-powered and have have no external power.
So, is this a good or dumb idea? If you know FireWire (I do not) I'd be interedted to know its pros and cons.
Thanks.

Daisy chaining FW 800 drives works just fine, I did it for years before upgrading.

Is it possible to daisy chain a thunderbolt drive between 2 imacs?

is it possible to daisy chain a thunderbolt drive between 2 imacs?

You can connect two thunderbolt harddrives to one computer, but you cannot connect two computers to one harddrive. That would result in a data signal conflict.
Hope this helps

Daisy Chaining MULTIPLE firewire drives...

Hello...
I am working on a large video project and have 7 500 GB firewire 800/400 drives, and 1 macbook pro (with no firewire 800 port).
I am working with DVCPRO HD footage so high speed is important. Is there a loss of speed when you daisy chain this many drives together? Any general rules when it comes to doing this? right now, I just have them all chained one, after another with 800 cables, and then going into the computer with a 400 cable.

I ran into problems once when chaining 7 or 8 drives. I was told that there is is a maximum cable length you can get to (can't remember if it was 10 or 15 feet) when daisy chaining after which you can run into problems.
Although it's possible I just had a bad cable in the line, I never checked, I just picked up 6 inch cables to use between drives and it solved the problem.
rh
PS I thought all the MacBook Pro's had one 800 port.

Cannot Daisy Chain My External Hard Drives on Macbook Pro Unibody

I have a 2010 Macbook Pro 13.3. I am trying to daisy chain my 2 external hard drive enclosures to my firewire 800 port. The enclosures are manufactured by Vantec, model Nextar 3. Both devices have 2 firewire 400/800 ports and they advertise that they are able to be daisy chained.
My issue is: I hook one to the other and power them both on and nothing seems to happen. I can power one up and the drive will show up on my desktop, but when I power the second drive up, I get the pop up screen saying I have disconnected my device without properly shutting it down, and then the drive is gone. I have tried connecting them several different ways. Im not sure if its the external enclosures, if there is a process I'm supposed to follow, of if the Macbook Pro Unibody does not support daisy chaining firewire 800 devices.
Please, if anybody has had the same experience and has been able to fix it, let me know. I am in need of some serious hard drive spance and am going to return both enclosures if I cannot get them to work.
Thank you.

I'm having the same issue.
I'v also found that I am able to daisy chain other drives throught the vantec drives.
And that, when I get the pop up screen saying I have disconnected my device without properly shutting it down, and the drive is gone. I'm only able to remount the drive after restarting the computer while the drive is conected and powered. It won't apear on other computers untill the reboot sequence is preformed.
Strange,
Let me knwo if you've found a solution.
thanks,
joe

New to daisy chaining my external hard drives need some guidence on this

I have 2; 3.5 inch 7200rpm 1TB hard drives, & bought some external enclosures with firewire ports for them.
what would the steps be to set them up?
some things I cannot seem to get a clear answer for even after Google searches is;
say I have drive A & drive B together, with drive A plugged into the firewire port on my mac & drive B plugged into drive A. If I only need to work with content on drive B, do I have to have drive A running as well? even if I do not need to work with it?
I notice in mac os that devices show up as no names, well if I need to eject my drives how can I tell which is which when they both show up with the same no name? I dont want to accidentally eject the wrong drives in the wrong order.
So to prevent something like this I would like to know if there is a way to get mac os to name each hard drive? say drive A would be called photos & drive B music. Is there a way to get windows to see them with these same names as well as in mac os?
another thing is I have windows xp pro installed through parallels on my mac & would like to work with my daisy chained drives in this as well.
what ever I do I dont want to screw up my drives, I have important data on them.
Message was edited by: Sossity

You can rename the drives to be just about anything you choose. That will help you to make sure that you are disconnecting the correct drive. As for the daisy chaining issue, I have found that even though the enclosures have the ports for this, I tend to see more issues with random disconnects. As near as I can tell, the Firewire port may not be providing sufficient power to drive two 7200 RPM drives at the same time. I personally prefer to use one drive on my FW800 port and a second on my FW400 port. Yes, one of the dries gets a lower bus speed, but for the increase in drive stability, it actually tends to perform slightly better overall since there are fewer drive disconnects under heavy load.
You reference Windows XP and Parallels. Parallels allow you to specify to connect a drive to the Mac OS side, or to the virtual environment running Windows. This is easily managed. If you are referring to Boot Camp, then yes, they will still work, as the Boot Camp drivers you should have installed would have installed drivers for the Firewire port. One other thing to keep in mind is that depending upon how the drives are formatted, you might have read-only access to the drives under one of the two OSes. You can buy/download drivers to give you full read/write access to HFS+ drives under Windows, and similarly for NTFS drives under Mac OS. Also, if you choose to connect the drives to a virtual Windows environment, then they will not be available to your Mac OS unless they are shared from the Windows side.

Daisy Chain Camcorder- External Hard Drive (firewire)- PowerBook?

Will it really cause problems? I'm going to buy a firewire card to avoid any fw bus problems but for now, would it drop frames and cause trouble?
Thanks
Vito

It does for some, not for others. We always preach that you need the card for the additional bus so that we ensure that it will work.
I myself never had a problem daisy chaining camera/deck/computer. Heck, I have even captured to my internal drive without dropping frames, so...guess I am special.
Nah, others can do this, but most cannot, so we preach the conservative way of doing things.
Shane

Camera not recognized unless daisy-chained with external HD

I just bought a LaCie 250GB external FW drive to use as a scatch disk for FCE. Now my camera (Sony DCR-HC30) is not recognized unless I plug it into the LaCie. I borrowed a second camera (Panasonic), swapped the FW cable while the camera and HD were plugged into separate FW ports, and the Panasonic was immediately connected in both iMovie (v4) and FCE. I've tried the suggested fixes (unplug, Garageband, swap ports, new cable...) and the problem remains. I upgraded memory, QT and applied several patches prior to attaching the HD. Any suggestions? Can I live with the daisy chain arrangement or will that cause problems importing to the external HD? (I've not tried to import any video yet). Thanks

Can I live with the daisy chain arrangement or will that cause problems importing to the external HD?
Yes and No, respectively.
(That's what I always did before getting an internal 200GB hard drive in my iMac.)

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?

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.

Extreme base and daisy chaining lacie stackable drives...

Had a external lacie drive working fine, showing up on my desk top. proceeded to daisy chain another drive on top, and can't get the thing to show up on the desk top for the life of me. What and where do I plug in the connecting usb or firewire, how do I get it to show up. Any help is greatly appreciated. thank you in advance.

thanks for response. So indeed the wires were wrong. Have everything on firewire now and the drive shows up. turned computer off and restarted everything. Now here is the issue. The original drive is recognized and mounts appropriately. When I hit connect to the next drive (the new one connected to first via firewire), I get this:THE ALIAS "NAME OF MY AIRPORT" COULD NOT BE OPENED BECAUSE THE ORIGINAL ITEM CANNOT BE FOUND" with my options to delete or fix alias. Deleting tells me I don't have sufficient privileges (not so sure I want to do that anyway) and fix just directs me to pick an application to open . I am at a loss.

Daisy chain an external drive

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