Hard Drive Dasiy Chain drops drives

G'day y'all,
I'm editing tutorial videos using FCP 5.1 on a MacBook Pro. My source material is stored on 5 external hard drives. I have 4-500 GB Maxtor III and 1-1TB Maxtor III drives.
When I have the 4-500 GB drives in the daisy chain (using firewire 800) it works great. The problem is when I add the 1 TB to the chain. With the 1 TB drive in the chain 1 or 2 of the 500 GB drives gets randomly removed/unmounted while I am working in FCP.
I noticed that the 500 GB drives are formatted as OS X extended and the 1 TB drive is formatted OS X extended (journaled.)
I talked to Seagate tech support and they thought that the difference in the formatting was the reason the drives were being dropped. I talked to a friend at Apple and she didn't think that the difference in formatting would cause the problem but maybe a power supply or firewire issue, but she works with software so...
Any ideas?
Thanks, Terese

I'm with your friend. It seems highly unlikely to me that the journaling would make the difference. If you're working on your macbook pro, I would suggest that you get a firewire 800 card so that you can divide the drives over 2 buses. You might try using shorter firewire cables, although in the past I've had up to 11 drives chained without any serious problems. Using higher quality firewire cables also might make a difference.
Are all the firewire interfaces the same? I had serious firewire problems that I think could only be attributed to the fact that I was mixing lacie and g-raid drives. Someone on the list (I think Jerry Hoffman) suggested that there might be some sort of compatability problem between the different firewire interfaces on the drives. I had an extremely problematic lacie drive that performed flawlessly when the g-raids were not connected.
Personally, I've moved to Sata drives with a 5 bay external sata enclosure. This is only a possible solution on your macbookpro, not your imac, though.

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+"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."+
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Hard Drive Dasiy Chain drops drives

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