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?

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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.

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

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.

How do you fix bad blocks on an external hard drive without using disk utility

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Oh...if you have data you are trying to save then its best to try cloning the drive to another one, which should save its data as-is to another drive. Hopefully you can do so without there being hangups around the bad blocks and keep at least most of your data intact. I'd recommend you try using Carbon Copy Cloner to do this, but you will need a secondary drive that is at least the size of the data on the problematic drive.

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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.

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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?
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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.

Daisy chain Voyager hard drives & iMac Intel Core2Duo (white model)

It would appear that Voyager hard drive enclosures from Newertek won't allow you to daisy chain them via SATA. Yet they conveniently provide you with a SATA cable if you have an eSATA port on your Mac. Is there any sort of KVM switch/ hub that makes the SATA hard drives connect directly to each other via SATA instead of via the iMac's Firewire for data transfer.
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You can get them - "firewire to sata bridges" is the term.
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Please help.
Insightful

can be this reasons
01 , you have problem with connection ? check the port if you can find any problems physically .
02. if not try to change the cable and with connection ,
03. may be its good idea to check the hard drive with another mac ?(if you have )
Did you note any diference of sound from Hard Drive ? listen to it that carefully to note some unusual sound comes when the hard drive works.
check this link this might usefull: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjgOSxKy-FQ

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Hi all
I am brand new to the mac from windows, so far so good! However I have an external hard drive that I want to plug into my mac and back up onto. Problem is when I connect it it is not "seen" in the finder window. The drive is presently formatted as NFTS. I want to reformat it for mac but unable in the disk utility option as it can't see it! Covered the basics ie drive works and is powered as checked on the (ex) windows machine. I have tried reformatting it under windows, the only choice I have is to NFTS. Am I missing something glaringly obvious here. Am sure this may be the first of many posts.....!!
Thanks in advance
Ynot

Hi! Is the drive a portable drive that doesn't have a separate power supply? If it's a portable put the drive up to your ear when you plug it in and see if it spins up or clicks. Inadequate usb power is often the problem. tom

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I have a similar problem. My external HD connected to the USB port of the TC can be accessed as a sharepoint as "guest" using my Ethernet connected iMac OK but when attempting to see either the TC or the attached HD on my LAN with Windows XP computers they no longer show either the TC or the USB HD under "internet places". Before changing to Snow Leopard the Windows computers could access the TC and HD just fine. Nothing else has changed. The wireless internet connection or wireless printing using the Windows computers still work OK. I don't know whether the problem likely is with Snow Leopard or some automatic update to the Windows computers.

I want to use a fantom diamond as an external hard drive for my mac, is this a good idea?

Using a Macbook pro, with Snow Leopard (I think), and my memory is full so I want to store my stuff on an external hard drive. I found a 2T Fantom Diamond EHD, but I'm now learning that I have to convert to NTFS-3g. I'm not computer savy so I want to know if this is a good idea, or should I look for something different. Also, can I set up the EHD as the default path for itunes?

This is not the forum for MacBook Pro owners.
You just need to reformat the drive in Disk Utility and erase the drive and have Mac HFS.
If you did need to use NTFS then you would not want -3G but Paragon NTFS for OS X x. 10.0
Or buy something that isn't pre-formatted to Windows NT file system.
First though make sure you have backups of your system. TimeMachine being used now?
http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-TimeMachine-drive.html
http://www.apple.com/support/timemachine/
Maybe cleanout some files you don't need.
Install a larger notebook hard drive even.
http://www.macsales.com/firewire has a lot of choice in Mac compatible drives and enclosures so you don't need to worry about Fantom not working at some point.
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro
https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/mac_os_x_v10.6_snow_leopard

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Update to iTunes 10.3.1
After you have finished, you can re download your iTunes purchases without having to re purchase.
iTunes 10.3.1
" Download Previous Purchases. Download your past music purchases again at no additional cost. Your purchases are available in the iTunes Store on your Mac or in the iTunes app on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Previous purchases may be unavailable if they are no longer on the iTunes Store."
"Available on iTunes in the U.S. and Canada only. Title availability is subject to change."
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Unable to back up external hard drive via Time Machine. Says no room but has back ups from two previous Mac notebooks on it. Tried deleting them and now can't do anything. Any ideas?

Unable to back up external hard drive via Time Machine. Says no room but has back ups from two previous Mac notebooks on it. Tried deleting them and now can't do anything. Any ideas?

As john noted, eventually that external is probably not going to be big enough, but it certainly is for now. The HD just needs enough capacity to cover the amount of data on your internal HD, not the internal HD's total capacity.
Format/partition the external as follows and you should be set to go:
1. Connect the external HD to the MBP.
2. Open Disk Utility on the MBP.
3. Select the external HD in the left pane.
4. Click on the Erase tab.
5. Choose the Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
NOTE: if you want to zero the HD (which I always think is a good idea, but does take time), click on Security Options, click the button for Zero Out Data, click OK. The larger the HD, the longer this will take, in some cases several hours.
6. Click on Erase and wait for the entire process to finish.
7. Click the Partition tab.
8. Click on Volume Scheme: and choose the number of partitions (just one in this situation).
9. Click on the Options button (located underneath the Volume Scheme pane) and select GUID.
10. Click Apply.
11. Quit Disk Utility.
Backup your internal to the external. What application are you using to backup with? I highly recommend both SuperDuper! and CarbonCopyCloner.

I am trying to save a doc. to a external hard drive and it wont allow me. I says its read only, any ideas on how to correct it?

I am trying to save a doc. to a external hard drive and it wont allow me. I says its read only, any ideas on how to correct it?

Save it on the internal HD then copy it from this safe location to the external device.
iWork applications can't apply their save process on devices which aren't formatted as HFS+.
But it may also be that for some reason, an external device formatted as HFS+ is set to Read Only.
If it's this case, you will have to change de setting before moving the file on it.
Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) vendredi 20 mai 2011 11:01:05
Please :
Search for questions similar to your own before submitting them to the community
To be the AW6 successor, iWork MUST integrate a TRUE DB, not a list organizer !

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

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