Daisy chain monitors and hard drive

How can I connect two additional monitors and an external hard drive to my iMac?

Only Thunderbolt allows for chaining Displays and External Hard Drives.
In addition your Thunderbolt devices must have an additional Thunderbolt port to chain the next device to.
Apple - Thunderbolt: Next-generation high-speed I/O technology.

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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

Audio Distortion on FW400 Audio Interface Daisy Chained to FW800 Hard Drive

Hi everyone! I’m an experienced Mac user in need of help resolving FireWire device issues.
I received my 27” i7 iMac a couple of weeks ago running 10.6.2. After a long process of migrating over from my 9+ year old Dual 500 MHz G4 PowerMac tower, I was excited to set up two 1TB drives inside an OWC Mercury Elite Quad-Interface Dual HD enclosure via FW800. I then daisy chained my Focusrite Saffire 10 audio interface (FW400) to the HD enclosure via a FW800 to FW400 converter cable. To reiterate:
i7 iMac (FW800 port) --> OWC Mercury Pro Quad-Interface Dual HD Case with 2X 1TB drives (FW800) --> Focusrite Saffire 10 audio interface (FW400)
Although a lot of people may disagree, I wasn’t concerned about having my FW800 hard drives drop down to FW400 speeds because of the slower audio interface. I have read enough about the 1394 FW protocol and its ability to use something called beta clouds, allowing both FW400 and FW800 daisy chained devices to operate at their maximum speeds. So far, so good. The drives are reading/writing data fast.
As many studio audiophiles have said, you should separate your audio recordings and projects from your startup disk. I’ve done so. However, call me naïve, but I did not imagine that every time my external drives read or wrote data, my audio interface would go into a state of distortion (like raising the gain on a track as high as it can go). When the activity of the disk drops below a certain level, the audio interface usually switches back to clean pristine audio. I am experiencing this within a studio environment and with simple CoreAudio iTunes playback via my audio interface. How is this possible? Am I doing something wrong or is there a blatant limitation with the FW chipset Apple is using for their single bus in the new iMacs? If anyone can provide me with a solution or a convenient work around, I will be very grateful!

Thank you for the feedback, Rick. To shed some light on daisy chaining FW800 with FW400 devices, I provide the following quote from one FireWire technical article I came across on the web:
+"The concept of beta clouds allows FireWire to keep all devices on the bus to operating at their maximum speeds. Devices are cluster together on a logical level in a cloud. The cloud operates as a single block at 800 Mb/sec. The borders of these clouds are where legacy devices are connected, operating normally. Each device operates at its highest speed."+
In short, beta clouds allow both devices to operate at their highest speeds.
Both the audio interface and the external hard drive enclosure has its own, connected power source.
I wish I had the option to use USB2 with my audio interface, but it only has a FW400 connection.

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

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

Can I put a MacBook processor and hard drive in a PowerMacG5?

I have a late 2008 MacBook that is showing its age and wear. The battery is worn out and the keys and mouse sometimes stick. I also have a PowerMac G5 which has an older operating system, but great working keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Can I put the processor and hard drive of the MacBook into the PowerMac and have a desktop version of the MacBook.

I have an older black MacBook 2007 era and use a Henge Dock when I want to connect it to my TV with a wireless keyboard/trackpad.
you would have to check to see if this is compatible with your particular model:
http://hengedocks.com/pages/vertical-macbook
an alternative is a stand, which would allow you to use the laptop display, in addition to another external display, on your desktop:
http://store.griffintechnology.com/elevator
PS- I have replaced the battery in my MacBook twice now, if it starts to swell up it can interfere with the trackpad button, causing it to register the button as being held all the time, which interferes with an external mouse as well. you can find replacement batteries here, an Apple store may not have them in stock.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Apple/Laptop/Batteries
to hook up the monitor, you will need one of the appropriate adapters, not sure what knid your MacBook uses, my older one has the miniDVI, they make adapters to go to standard VGA or DVI monitors, there were a few different video ports on the MacBooks, you can lookup the specs of yours at www.everymac.com if you are not sure what the plug type is.

Problem with daisy chaining HDDs and Time Machine

I have purchased 2 WD My Passport Studio FireWire 2TB HDDs which I have daisy chained to my MacBook Pro. One I have assigned to be the Time Machine backup the other as an additional data drive. Both are formatted for Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I setup Time Machine to backup both the internal and external drive. When I set it up everything looked OK in Time Machine Preferences, but the daisy chained data drive displayed on the desktop with the Time Machine backup logo and the backup drive displayed as a standard FireWire data drive. However the backup worked successfully and backed everything up to the correct backup drive.
I have since established the following:
1. If both drives are daisy chained and then plugged in, the data drive shows up with the backup icon and the backup drive shows as a data drive, but Time Machine backs up to the correct drive. This is the case regardless of what order the drives are daisy chained.
2. If the backup drive is plugged in on its own it shows up correctly with the backup drive icon. If the data drive is then daisy chained to the backup drive both drives show up as backup drives. Time Machine backs up to the correct backup drive.
3. If the data drive is plugged in on its own it shows up incorrectly as the backup drive. If the backup drive is then daisy chained to the data drive the backup drive shows as a normal FireWire data drive. But Time Machine still backs up to the correct drive. Exactly the same as case 1 but the drives have been daisy chained after connecting to the MacBook Pro and the result is the same.
4. However if the data drive is plugged in on its own, showing up as the backup drive, Time Machine backs up to the data drive incorrectly.
The first three points are just annoying as the drive icons do not display correctly, although it does indicate to me that Time Machine is confused. But what I don't like is the fact that I can't just use the external data drive without the backup drive being present.
How do I overcome this problem?

Launch Disk Utility and select one of the volumes in question. Click the Info button in the toolbar. In the Information window that opens, note the Universal Unique Identifier. Do the same with the other volume. Are the identifiers the same?

Memory modules and hard drive not recognized

I removed and reinserted the factory installed Satellite L505D-LS5007 laptop hard drive and memory modules just as practice for installing a hard drive upgrade and an 8GB memory upgrade. The problem is obviously with the memory and not with the hard drive.
After the first practice try, one memory module was recognized. Also for a few seconds after the first practice try, I ran the PC with the battery installed, but no memory installed. I did not look in the User's Guide first to see that I should have removed the battery before removing the memory.
Now the System Indicator Lights for the HDD Activity and Memory Card Reader do not light up. The PC turns on and the display is solid black with no messages.
Before buying new memory modules, what possible ways might there be to get the PC to recognize the factory installed memory modules and hard drive again?
Solved!
Go to Solution.

When troubleshooting, I always change one variable at a time. I would hate to miss a solution by being in a hurry. In this case, you may have damaged either the RAM or the RAM slot. I would stick with the Toshiba specifications for the RAM, making sure it is the correct size, speed and type recommended. I also recommend that when you replace the RAM that both modules be from the same manufacturer, size, and specification. Try one RAM module in one slot and then the other. And then try both RAM modules in both slots. After the testing you should be able to figure if this is a RAM problem or a RAM slot problem.
In the case of hard drives, the real test is whether or not the Bios sees the hard drive. If the Bios doesn't see the hard drive, it's not going to work. The Bios should see the hard drive whether or not the hard drive is partitioned, formatted or has data on it. My experience has been that many Toshiba laptops will work fine with larger capacity hard drives provided they are the same speed in RPMs, have the same interfacing connection and physically the same size.
Again, prior to doing any work on your computer, make sure that both the AC power has been disconnected and the battery has been removed. Be careful out there. A blown repair job by a non-Toshiba tech is NOT covered under warranty.

I need to upgrade my macbook ram and hard drive pls help

Hi all,
I need to upgrade my macbook's RAM and hard drive as after 3 yrs of use it is showing signs of aging.
I am novice in hardware stuff. I am planning on doing it entirely by myself and on tight budget will need to compare the prices across sellers and buy a suitable peice of kit. Please help
Questions:
1 - How to find out which RAm do I need to buy and what is the maximum I can go on my macbook?
2 - How to find which hard drive to buy and what is the maximum my macbook will support?
3 - Can I buy the SSD drive instead of SATA for this macbook?
Some of the specs are listed below:
Hardware Overview:
Model Name:          MacBook
Model Identifier:          MacBook5,2
Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:          2 GHz
Number Of Processors:          1
Total Number Of Cores:          2
L2 Cache:          3 MB
Memory:          2 GB
Bus Speed:          1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version:          MB52.0088.B05
SMC Version (system):          1.38f5
MANY THANKS FOR READING AND REPLYING TO MY POST
[email protected]

Hi Chefjeegar
Yes that screwdriver kit has the #00 phillips screwdriver that you need to access the RAM and hard drive. You'll also need the Torx driver to change the hard drive. http://www.amazon.co.uk/LINDY-Computer-Technician-Precision-Torx/dp/B0000934GO/r ef=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1348072554&sr=1-1
For a good explanation about RAM look at the page on OWC http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/MacBook/DDR2/
In the UK Amazon or eBay might be your best bet for cheap RAM but read the description and reviews carefully. For a little more expensive but with a better warranty is Crucial UK http://www.crucial.com/uk/
A good resource for working on your MacBook is ifixit.com http://www.ifixit.com/Device/MacBook_Core_2_Duo
Is your external hard drive formatted for Mac? To transfer your current hard drive I like the free application Carbon Copy Cloner. It makes a bootable copy of everything on your hard drive http://www.bombich.com/index.html Check that it's set up right by booting up from the external drive. Put the new drive in your MacBook, then format and partition the new drive. Then use Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer your OS back to the new drive.
Yes, you can put an SSD in the MacBook.

Deleting a song from iTunes library and hard drive on Itunes 11.0

how do i delete a song from iTunes library and hard drive on Itunes 11.0 at the same time.

Hello CleveCo, Inc
And welcome to Apple Discussions!
At some point in time, you may have selected the option to prevent that dialog from appearing again when trying to delete tracks from your library. To reset all of iTunes warning dialogs, click the Edit drop down menu and choose Preferences from the list (on a Mac it is *iTunes -> Preferences* ). When the window pops up, head over to the Advanced tab and click the *Reset Warnings* button. Then quit iTunes and relaunch it. That do the trick for you?
B-rock

How do i use airport as both time machine and hard drive? currently on Yosemite 10.10.1

how do i use my 3TB airport time capsule as both time machine and hard drive? currently on Yosemite 10.10.1.....Many Thanks.

Choose Computer from the Finder's Go menu and double-click it. If needed, use the Connect to Server command to log into it.
(119763)

New RAM and hard drive won't connect to computer. It's still making the beeping noise. Any ideas?

My computer stopped working and I thought it was my RAM and hard drive so I bought a new one of each of these. However, when I tried turning my computer back on after replacing them, it still made the beeping noise. I am clueless. Does anyone know what could be the cause and how to fix it. Thanks!!

What type of beeping noise?
What machine specs? What type of RAM and HDD?
Power On Self-Test Beep Definition - Part 2 - Support - Apple

2011 Macbook Pro - if i upgrade ram and Hard drive will it void my applecare ?

2011 13" Macbook Pro - if i upgrade ram and Hard drive will it void my 3 years of applecare ? - Does apple offer this service ?
Thanks

However it might be worth reading this article in The Register about Apple not using standard temperature sensing methodology - see
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/14/imac_hard_drive_replacement_woes/http://
also read the links to OWC comments.

Daisy chain monitors and hard drive

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