Firewire drives work individually; fail when daisy chained

I have 3 FW400 drives daisy-chained. All was fine until a couple of weeks ago when I started having problems with drives randomly freezing up or unmounting, especially when writing large amounts of data (e.g., during a backup.)
Despite multiple repairs with Disk Utility, running Disk Warrior & reformatting one of the drives, the problem continues.
But--each drive works fine when connected directly to the Mac.
-Does this indicate a problem with the chipset in one of the drives? (I already ran Hardware Test on my G5.)
-Would a Firewire hub solve this problem?

I have seen this problem before. It could be a chipset failure but it may be that each of the chipsets has the same ID. This causes problems with connecting them all at once. It seems to me that recent changes in Mac OS X can cause FW enclosures with the same ID to have problems connecting at the same time.
One way you can verify this is if the enclosures also have USB 2.0 connections you will find they work with one on FireWire and the other two on USB.
If an ID problem is your situation, even a hub will not help. If you have a friend with a hub or you have a WiebeTech Maxelerate you can use its hub to verify if a hub will work or not.
http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/wiebetech/max/
You might want to contact the FW enclosure manufacturer and see what they believe the issue is. Quite frankly, if you need to use more than a single enclosure or hard drive at a time I would consider external SATA. It is a lot more reliable for me.
Have fun,
Michael

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Thunderbolt to firewire adaptor does not work when daisy chaining firewire devices

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I just purchased the Thunderbolt to firewire adaptor for my new late 2012 iMac.
It works when connecting a single firewire device, but when I daisy chain another drive, the first drive disconnects and nothing mounts.
I am trying a Hitachi G-Raid and a couple of WD My Studio II hard drives. They all work when connected directly to the adaptor, but not when more than one drive if daisy chained with firewire.
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Thanks

Yikes, that's sad to hear.
I can't test it, no TB here, but are all these drives self AC powered, ie. no bus powered drives?

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.
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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.

Only One FireWire Jack on MacBook Pro - will daisy chaining work?

So I installed L8 on my MacBook Pro and put all the Content and GarageBand Loops on my external Lacie drive via Firewire. I also plan to record to the external drive via FireWire. However I also connect my Onyx 1640 to my MacBook Pro via Firewire.
I've only one FireWire Jack on my MacBook Pro but need two. Is there a work around for this? Can I just plug my Onyx into the External HD and only the HD to my Mac? (Is this daisy chaining?)

Daisy chaining as you described is possible with firewire (as long as you have a device with two firewire ports, of course!), but too much I/O and you can saturate the firewire bus. (How often this happens in reality, I don't know. Anyone?)
If your MacBook Pro has an express card slot, a solution might be to buy a firewire express card/34. That way, you can have the audio interface on the firewire bus, and the hard drive on the separate express card bus. I also think most of the firewire express cards come with TWO inputs, so you'll even get an extra.

LaCie drives won't mount in daisy-chain setup on new 21" iMac

Hi,
My 2 LaCie externals (Quadra v3 and Quadra v2.1) are not being recognised as a daisy-chain setup with my new 21" iMac.
I have the Quadra v3 connected to the iMac with USB 3.0 cable. It mounts only every 1 in 10 attempts. When successfully mounted, I daisy chain the Quadra v2.1 into the v3 via a FW800 cable and it is not mounting at all.
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If anyone has had this issue and knows a solution I'd love to hear it!
Regards,
rowbo

You cannot daisy-chain disk drives across different connection types/protocols. In other words, you cannot daisy-chain drives using both USB and FW in the same daisy-chain. This is explained in the Lacie d2 user manuals.
It is, actually, quite surprising that you have been able to do this with your MBP. It should not work at all. You are lucky in this particular case, but I would urge caution assuming that this connection will continue to work, or even work reliably. imho you are lucky you haven't fried your drives doing this, or fried the USB port in your MBP.
Anyway, no multi-connection drive is built to support cross-connection daisy chaining. You can do USB-USB or FW-FW, but not USB-FW.

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By the way Bosanac...
Welcome to the Apple Discussions!
It seems as though I had a similar issue with my ministack external drive and I stopped using it and I have used several different external drives with all my Mac including my iMac. It's definitely hard to say as I would lean more towards the G-drive. I would contact G-Technology and see if they have nay suggestions.
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stay away from belkin cards though, nothing but reported problems.
www.macsales.com
www.macgurus.com
both great places for products like these. i put a siig card in my g4 from macsales and i've never had a firewire related problem of any kind.
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Hello everyone.
I connected a USB drive to my airport extreme. it does show in finder but whenever u try to access it I get the.
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Hello all-
I have the same problem. I have a WD 250GB My Book Drive (FAT32 Formatted). When I connect the drive to the AEBS, I get two problems:
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Message was edited by: P-Train

There is no display on Apple Thunderbolt display, when Daisy chain connect with six LaCie Little Big Disks.

Hi, Everyone,
I have aquestion with Thunderbolt daisy chan.
I have six LaCie Little Big Disks and Apple Thunderbolt Display to make daisy chan and I got a problem.
I place the Apple Thunderbolt Display at the end of the chain, and six LaCie Little Big Disks infront, and Apple Thunderbolt Display does not show anything.
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I am having trouble getting my flex war file to work when I create it using Ant, even though the same war works fine when I create it from my Eclipse Export War function. This is a critical problem and any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I have a working installation of LCDS running under JBoss 4.0.5 (in a CENTOS (Red Hat) environment). I have implemented a datatier in Java to interact with my PostgreSQL 8.x database. The Java code, plus the necessary flex jars and xml files and some mxml test programs, are all in an Eclipse J2EE project that I created from the flex samples.war file. It all works fine when I use Eclipse to create a WAR from the project and deploy it in JBoss. My problem is this: When I create a WAR piece by piece using Ant, then deploy it to JBoss, that WAR does not work. The error I get is this:
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When I look at the log I see this problem:
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Thanks in advance!

Have you tried enabling debug level logging and removing the category filters in services-config.xml? It should show all the destinations being created, and if any are failing. To get the maximum level of log detail, something like this should work:
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>
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>
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Have a check that your remoting destinations are shown starting correctly for both WAR files, and see if there are any messages in the log that might be relevant.

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.

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?

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

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.

Firewire drives work individually; fail when daisy chained

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