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)

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