Daisy chain external drive?

I was looking into getting something like this:
http://www.overstock.com/Electronics/Coolmax-Aluminum-Hard-Drive-Enclosure/24790 01/product.html
for two computers to work on outside of a wireless/AirExtreme router where there isnt an option to connect a harddrive to the usb port. so i was wondering could potentially one computer be hooked up to the usb port of an external drive like this and the other via firewire and share and swap files if necessary or atleast access them?
or unless there is a more stable, reliable and better option, id love to hear any suggestions
thank you so much!

Hi AppleNewton;
You asked; "one computer be hooked up to the usb port of an external drive like this and the other via firewire and share and swap files if necessary or atleast access them?
You never ever what to connect one drive to multiple Mac directly. Mac OS does not support disk lock with multiply system. Hence this is a sure way to corrupt the data on the drive.
Allan

Similar Messages

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

Daisy chain external drives

Hi. Let's say I have an internal drive (drive A) in my MacBook Pro, an external drive (drive B) connected via FireWire 800 to my MacBook Pro, and another external drive (drive C) connected via FireWire 800 to the rear of drive B. All drives are formatted as HFS+. Drive B holds my iTunes library.
1. Can I use Time Machine to back up drive A onto drive C?
2. Can I use Time Machine to back up drive B onto drive C?
3. Is there a brand of external drive that works well with this daisy chain approach?
4. Is there a better way / drive configuration to back up drives A and B?
Pls note my MacBook Pro has only one FireWire 800 port. Also pls note that I am not interested in a NAS.
Thanks

All theoretically possible, but I've found even some of the most reliable Firewire drives despite being daisy chained, such as the Newertech from OWC. They may not stay connected indefinitely, and they definitely don't copy directly between each other. Copying from computer to each of them on separate connections is much faster than trying to copy between them. At times, it is almost as slow as USB 1 when I try to copy directly from one to the other simply with the Finder. Don't expect Time Machine to be much faster. My advice, get a disk copier along with the Newertech Voyager. Disk copiers such as
http://www.amazon.com/HDD-Duplicator-Stand-Alone-Sata/dp/B002OTG0PO'
work a lot faster than trying to deal with the intricacies of daisy chaining.
Firewire 800 is great for single hard drives. But forget about daisy chaining. I've tried all the best brands, and they've backfired.

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.

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 Chaining External HDDs

Okay, I know this has been asked a couple of times around the Discussion Boards, but I want to clarify and expand upon it.
Right now I have one 500GB LaCie d2 External HDD that I use only for Time Machine. This works out great, however, as I download more content from the iTunes store, buy more music, etc., it's evident that I'm going to need more space eventually.
My plan is to buy two or three more 500GB HDDs. Each will be used for a different purpose: one for iMovie, one for iTunes and video, and maybe one more just for extra storage if I need it. I don't really need to go any larger, and I don't want to ever put too much on a HDD anyway incase it ever bites the bullet.
My question relates to daisy chaining all of the drives. I use Firewire 800, and I just want to make sure that I should have any problems if the HDDs run daisy chained together. Also, do you think I would have any problems keeping the drives on all of the time if they were rack mounted?

Theoretically you should be fine daisy chaining the drives as long as they are individually powered. I think those people having problems may be related to the particular drive cases being used. One way you could cut down on the number of external cases is to get a dual drive enclosure. This is the one that I am using:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEFW924AL2K/
Just buy two hard drives and install them into the case. Set the jumper to JBOD and both drives will mount over a single FW800 connection.
George

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.

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

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.

Will Aperture backup to a vault with daisy chained external hard drives

I am moving my Aperture library to a 6TB external drive. I want to back that up to a disaster drive consisting of 2 g-drives daisy chained, one 2TB and the other 4TB.
Will Aperture recognize the daisy chained drives as a single drive and backup the Aperture library to these drives as a single vault?

Caveat: answering your question requires one to make lots of assumptions, any one of which might change the answer. I do not know if Aperture would do so or not but personally I would not recommend it.
Note that daisy-chaining is simply a method of connecting drives; the drives themselves each remain fully independent. One needs to build a RAID array to combine independent volumes, and that is usually best done with fairly identical drives rather than with a 4TB and a 2TB.
I strongly believe that unless one is a true mass-storage expert very large Managed-Originals Libraries should be avoided. IMO far preferable is to instead use Refererenced-Originals Libraries.
Databases invariably perform better in numerous ways when smaller.
-Allen

Good Idea, Bad Idea: Daisy-chaining external hard drives

I'm about to buy a White Macbook (maxing out RAM) which has one Firewire 400 port.
I currently use a Firebox to record audio and I know that I will need an external hard drive. The consensus is that Firewire is far superior than USB 2.0 due to a stable transfer rate.
However, I'm wondering which is superior in this case- getting a Firewire 400 external hard drive (7200rpm of course) and daisy-chaining it, or getting a USB 2.0 hard drive?
I typically only record 2 tracks at a time with my Firebox, but I would prefer it if I could use it to its full capacity and record 6 if I wanted to. I assume that this will have a great effect on it when daisy-chained.
With my current machine (details listed below), I get messages all the time from Logic Pro telling me I'm overloading it or maxing it out or whatever. In buying a new machine, I strongly desire not to have these problems again, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'm under the impression there isn't a laptop being currently produced that has two Firewire 400 slots and is capable of running Logic Pro. Apple's offering has two choices - 1 Firewire 400 slot in the White Macbook for $999, and 1 Firewire 800 slot in the Macbook Pro line, starting at $1999. It is absolutely horrific, I know, but I didn't design the current line.
Since the biggest advantages between the $1999 model and the $999 model have very little to do with audio editing, I decided against the extra grand for some fancy new toys.
Advantages of higher-end:
A) Better graphics card
B) 0.3 Ghz more processing power
C) multi-touch trackpad
D) environmentally friendly
E) possibility of installing a solid state drive- at 128 GB.
My current machine was upgraded once, but was quickly smited back to original specs by a power surge (seriously- all I lost were the upgrades). It has since then been a bit of a finicky computer. It freezes now and then, and the kernel errors are frustrating. Plus, it's noisy.
So yeah- I would totally take you up on the notion of upgrading my current machine first, but it's not really worth the trouble anymore.
I've also posted before and have been told that pretty much any Mac I buy now will be far superior than my current machine.
That being said, I suppose I ought to look into USB 2.0 external drives.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Advice for what to look for? If I could find one that is 9600rpms, will that make a difference or is 7600rpm pretty much the max for the 400mbs transfer speed? Any suggestions for external drives that use both Firewire and USB 2.0? Any other ideas in general?

Daisy chaining external hard drives and a video camera from a single firewire 800 port on my imac

I have only a single firewire 800 port on my imac and want to know if I can daisy chain two external hard drives and my video camera, please? If not is there another solution using USB 2?

Are the external HDs self powered or powered by the FW port? If they are self powered there should not be a problem. If they are port powered they may put a strain on the port's power output but I'n not positive on that.

How do I Daisy Chain external Firewire drives

Sorry if this seems a dumb question but.....
I want to add another External Hard Drive as my current one is starting to get full, I'm using a Western Digital FireWire 800 currently and I believe that I can add another External FireWire 800 drive by daisy chaining it with the existing drive using a FW800 connector. Is this correct?
Will it just appear on the desktop as another drive to which I can save files etc or do I have to do anything else?
Once again sorry if this sounds like a dumb question but I just want to make sure I don't do anything that will cause me problems later down the line.

Yes, as long as drive 1 has two sockets, just plug drive 2 into drive 1 and drive 1 into the computer and it all works seamlessly; both appear on the desktop just as if they were plugged into separate sockets. Of course drive 1 must be powered, or drive 2 won't appear.

Daisy Chaining External Hard Drives

How many self-powered, or powered HDs can be daisy chained to the TC's USB port? Will all of the external drives be available on the Mac? I have several HDs I routinely access for files and would like to do it wirelessly. I would also like to be able to backup those drives on the TC or other external.

There is no specific documentation (that I could find anyway) that state exactly how many devices can be daisy-chained to the Time Capsule. Although I would assume that the USB port on the Time Capsule is no different than the one on your Mac - which would mean up to 127 devices per host controller or USB port. Although I don't have any personal experience connecting more than one (4 port) USB hub, I noticed a reduced connection speed when trying to use more than one drive simultaneously besides the obvious fact that you are already limited by the wireless network speed. This was compared to using the same procedure while having the USB hub directly attached to my iMac.
The way the external drives show from your Mac is similar to how the Time Capsule internal drive shows. When you select the Time Capsule from the Finder window, it will show all the external drives by name. The external drives, of course, should be formatted appropriately.
In order to backup these drives, you would need additional software such as Prosoft Backup or similar. You would not be able to accomplish it using Time Machine.
Attaching an external drive using this method is referred to as network attached storage. Not all software can fully use this connection method to all of it's capabilities.... yet. So it does not function quite the same as attaching the drive directly to your computer. You would lose certain functions, like most backup solutions or being able to boot from the drives. Even some software doesn't recognize the drives as usable storage.

Daisy chain thunderbolt drives and RAID

Hi everyone!
I was wondering, is it possible to buy several thunderbold drives, daisy chain them, and then make them act like a RAID 5 ?
Another question would be: I looked around the lacie drives and they said they can be put as RAID 0 or 1, but when you daisy chain them, so every one of them become a RAID 0 or 1 independent from the other or do they act as one?
Thank you for the precisions!

I believe you may do that provided the iMac is at the end of the chain, so the external drive must be able to pass through the port. But Apple's information on chaining is in relation to their standalone displays which must terminate the chain. So I am assuming that may also apply in your case even though the iMac isn't a standalone display.
It may be much simpler to use an USB external drive.

Daisy chain external drive?

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