Daisy-chaining firewire 400 and firewire 800?

I would like to daisy-chain two Western Digital MyBook Pros to a Macbook:
- FW 400 from Macbook to first drive
- FW 800 between the drives
Would this work or not? I have one of those, they have 2 x FW 800, 1 x FW 400, 1 x USB at back.
(If not, I'll buy a 'Premium' which has 2 x FW 400, and 1 x USB..)

JoeyR wrote:
I'm not sure if the hardware in the first drive, that's connected by firewire 400 is "smart" enough to jump the data over to the FW800 connectors for daisy chaining.
Just pulled this from the WD site. I would say this indicates it would work. You won't get more speed but they should work daisy chained. This indicates the drive is smart enough to do this.
+Question: Will Western Digital FireWire 400 (1394a) external hard drives work connected to a FireWire 800 (1394b) port?+
+Answer: The FireWire 800 Specification (1394b) states that FireWire 400 devices will work while connected to a FireWire 800 (1394b) port. The FireWire 400 cable (4-6 pin or 6-6 pin) will not connect to a FireWire 800 port (9 pin) therefore you will need to connect the hard drive using a FireWire 400 to FireWire 800 cable (1394a to 1394b cable). These cables are available at most computer stores.+

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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 and 400 devices

I am considering purchasing a blue-ray DVD recorder that has two 800 ports and one 400 port. My sony video camera has a firewire 400 connection and I am wondering whether that camera cable may be used to import video using my 400 cable connected to the 400 port. One 800 port would be connected to the computer. Or should I purchase a firewire800 to 400 (4 pin) cable and use the second 800 port on the recorder, or go direct from the computer swapping the cables when importing video?

Hi Charles
If your using the Core Duo with 2 400 ports listed in your profile, then you might be better off just connecting the player up 400 and then using the second 400 port for the camera. If however we are talking about a newer iMac, one with a single 800 port then you will want to connect the recorder up 800 and then the camera up 400 to that.
Also see > http://support.apple.com/kb/TA26476
Dennis

Daisy-chain Firewire 800 versus USB

Hi. I have an external drive (drive A) connected to my MPB via Firewire 800. I have my iTunes media library on this drive (movies, TV shows, music etc). When I watch a movie on my Apple TV, the content is being streamed from this drive via my MBP to the Apple TV. This works fine.
I also have a second external drive (drive B) that I use only as a back-up for drive A. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up drive A onto drive B. I can connect drive B in one of two ways: Option #1 is to connect drive B directly to my MBP via USB (USD 2.0). This is how I currently have it connected. Option #2 is to connect drive B to drive A via a Firewire 800 cable, daisy-chaining the two drives.
Two questions:
1. Which option will give me better performance when backing up drive A to drive B?
2. If I am watching a movie on Apple TV (streaming from drive A) at the same time that I am backing up drive A to drive B, will option #2 affect streaming of the movie?
Thank you

Have you Shut down your Mac and disconnected your firewire cable from both ends and let it sit about ten minutes then reconnect and try. Also, it is important to disconnect the AC power to your Mac, this helps to reset the FireWire port(s).
Have you checked to see if Disk Utility sees it/ can mount it?
Do you have TechTool Pro or DiskWarrior, both of which you could use to try to mount it.
It is also possible that you have a bad cable or a bad port, do other FW devices work?
-mj

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.

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

Flickering video when daisy chaining firewire devices - HELP!

I have a 12" Powerbook with a single firewire 400 port, to which I have attached 2 daisy chained external hard drives. I have no problem capuring video off of my camcorder when I daisy chain it onto the end, but when the firewire is sending video the other way, as in the case of "printing" to tape, or using a television during editing, the audio clips and the video flickers substantially.
I've observed that connecting the camera directly to the computer eliminates this problem. Of course, it's a bit awkward, since I also eliminate my scratch disks (the external drives)! I've tried a firewire hub as well, and it seems that either the extra device or the doubled length of cable is interfering with the signal in such a way as to cause the flickering.
Has anyone else experienced this problem?
In any case, I'm thinking about buying a MacBook Pro. Assuming I run into the same problem, I was thinking about adding firewire buses with the Express Card slot. Has anyone done this, or have recommendations for firewire cards that reliably work with MBPs?

When you say 'flickering' what do you mean?
If the playback is stuttering, meaning the data rate is not being sustained, then it is a Firewire glitch. If the video is strobing or rolling then it a video issue with the timeline or the capture settings or something else.
We daisy chained Firewire back in the day on the first edition Powerbook (400Mhz with 10GB internal) and had no issues, that was 4-5 years ago, so your PB12 should be fine with this.

Does daisy chained firewires make performance drop?

Hi all, just looking for a quick answer by someone who knows what they're talking about. Will daisy chaining firewire 400 drives together on a Mac or PC create a performance drop? I'm editing a project using 2 daisy chained drives at the moment with media on both. My co-worker claims it will slow down the computer's access to the media, I say it won't. Neither of us has any hard evidence and a quick google search doesn't turn up anything substantial either. What I'm looking for is hard engineering evidence. Thanks!

The firewire protocol allows for 63 or so devices to be chained together.
Running two FW400 devices should not be an issue. I've run up to a eight on chain in the past.
Still, be aware that some drives do not play well with other drives on the same chain. I have a G-RAID 500GB drive that tanks when there is another drive connected. It runs fine when it is the only drive on the bus.
If you are curious, go to the AJA website and find the "AJA System Test" app. It is a disk drive throughput test. Connect your drives in various configurations and see what happens.
Good luck,
x

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

Conflicts between the FW-400 and FW-800 ports?

Has anyone found a problem when using both the FW-400 and FW-800 ports on the iMac? I have a Tascam FW-1082 connected to the FW-400 port that simply won't work as long as anything is plugged into the FW-800 port. I tired 3 different FW-800 drives and they all crashed the FW-1082. Most unfortunate since the whole reason for buying the 24" iMac (one month before the new iMac's were announced... grrr) was for the FW-800 port.

Greetings.. I have the exact same MacPro that you have. I started a post that has gotten quite lengthy that details a number of firewire issues after Snow Leopard, so maybe your experiences would go well there as well.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136580&tstart=0
I have not been able to get a solution to my problem personally by switching devices from front or back, but perhaps there is something to that if they both use a separate bridge controller etc. If you have a Cinema display or the like, have you tried to use the ports on it?
Anyway...
Chris

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

Firewire Daisy Chaining With 400(6pin) and 800(9pin)

I am purchasing the new 17"MBP and it is my first Mac in about 4 years(so glad to get back to Mac because of my work)
Anyway, I want to daisy chain two of my HDDs but I have one 9pin cable for my desktop HDD and one 6pin for my portable HDD. Will this still work fine, or should I just buy another 9pin?
They are both Lacie HDDs and both have 9pin and 6pin.
Also, I have been out of the loop for a while, how many HDDs can you hook up together through firewire without problems. Could you technically hook more up through Firewire 800(saying that all drives are hooked up through 800)
Thanks for the help!

Please see this posting... it was targeted for another topic, but I am sure this response also applies here!
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8922899#8922899
Cheers!
—tonza

Daisy Chaining Firewire And Thunderbolt

I have a 2009 iMac and a couple of G Tech external drives linked via Firewire 800. Runs FCPX okay if slow on "export/share". I'm about to buy a MBP retina 13 inch, I need the portability, but wish to keep using the iMac as the main editing machine.
I'd use an external drive with the Retina, Thunderbolt/USB 3.0 seems the optimum choice. My question concerns using "material" stored on the Tbolt/USB external drive for use with FCPX on the iMac via the G Tech Firewire external drive.
Can I simply connect the iMac to the GTech drive via the single Firewire port, and connect the Tbolt/USB to the Gtech drive via the Apple Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter, and thus transfer files (or even FCPX projects) from the new drive to the old drive?
Ron

Yes. Depending on the drive enclosure you may need to power the TBolt drive as it may no longer be bus-powered. My LaCie Rugged drives are bus-powered through the adapter cable. My OWC drives are not.

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)

Daisy-chaining firewire devices on iMac

I have an intel-based iMac which I have a Lacie HD connected to the 800 FW port (that's connected to Time Machine) and I have a Lacie HD, a Hitachi HD, an eyeTV 200 unit and Lacie d2 DVD-RW drive daisy-chained on the 400 FW port. When I attempt to copy a DVD (of my own making, not a commercial DVD) using the Lacie DVD burner and the internal DVD burner, I get a error message saying the connection was interrupted.
What I'm wondering is if I need to string these devices in a particular order or is there some sort of firewire hub I can buy to connect these devices to the iMac, since it only has one FW 400 port?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Mike

I bought a Belkin FW hub and haven't had a problem with it:
http://www.buy.com/prod/belkin-6-port-firewire-hub-6-x-6-pin-firewire-ieee-1394a -firewire-400/q/loc/101/201955859.html
My only complaint about it would be that it is extremely light - so light that it doesn't like to stay in one spot and the FW cable connecting it to the computer seems to drag it off the shelf, but maybe if all or most of the ports are being used at the same time (which I haven't tried), it'll stay in place.

Daisy-chaining firewire 400 and firewire 800?

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