How do I Daisy Chain external Firewire drives

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.

Similar Messages

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.

How to reestablish connection to external FireWire drive with iTunesLibrary

Hello all. Here's the scenario I would like help with, please:
I currently have a G5 Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac running Leopard 10.5.1 and iTunes 7.6 . I have my iTunes library of tunes on an external FireWire Drive. I expect to purchase a Mac Pro soon. I expect to use Migration Assistant to pull files from my G5 over to the Mac Pro. Good so far.
Everything I've read about having ones iTunes songs on an external drive always starts with the assumption that the iTunes songs are currently on ones internal drive. In my case, as you can see, that is not the case. Given that I already have my songs on an external drive, that I'll have a new computer with things in their default positions (unless Migration Asst. pulls over my iTunes preferences including iTunes songs location), how, then, can I make sure the new iTunes app on the new Mac Pro "sees" where my music already exists?
Thanks for any help you might give. I'd like to be able to get iTunes working properly from day one on the new Mac Pro without iTunes problems.
Wayne

Thank you Airsculpture. What you laid out is the exact procedure I have used in the past. For some reason I thought switching to a new OS on a new computer might complicate things further. Glad to see that is not the case.
I appreciate your help!
Regards,
PWRMAC

How Do You Verify an External Firewire Drive?

Hi. How do you use Disk Utility or the Terminal to verify the condition of an external firewire drive (which I use as Time Machine) that is not Time Capsule? Is there a program for it on Boot Camp Windows? Thank you in advance.
Gbu

Open disk utility and click on the drive the click verify.

MacBook Air Thunderbolt-to-FireWire adapter and daisy-chaining external FW drives

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?
The external drives are a pair of G-Tech G-Drive minis, but one is a year to 18-months older than the other one, which means it probably has an older FireWire chipset, but on the other hand, they do mount successfully as self-powered FW 800 drives from a native FW 800 port, or even from a daisy-chain originating from a FW 800 port. Anyone have any suggestions?

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 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.

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?

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?

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.

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

How to install tiger on external firewire drive

I'd like to upgrade my dual 2GHz Power PC G5 to 10.5, but I need access to OS9 from time to time. To solve this I wanted to install 10.4 with OS9 on my external HDD. I partitioned my Western Digital drive (connected by FW800) and installed 10.4 from the install disk. However, when I select it as the startup disk, the startup fails to identify the disk and starts from the internal drive.
I tried to follow instructions from an old post, but one thing that was different was that when partitioning my harddrive, I did not have the option for GUID, I just had the option for Apple Partion Map. Oddly, now that I installed OSX 10.4, the option for GUID appears, but still seams incorrect since I'm on a G5 CPU.
Any ideas why I can't boot from the external drive? Any suggestions on how to install OS9 and migrate my user folders over when I get it working?
Thanks,
Marcus

Many Western Digital firewire drives will not boot a PPC mac. From this WD support page:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/stdadp.php?pfaqid=1787
The following external hard drives are not bootable on Power PC based Macintosh computers systems through USB/FireWire 1394(a/b):
* My Book Essential Edition
* My Book Essential Edition 2.0
* My Book Home Edition
* My Book Mirror Edition
* My Book Office Edition
* My Book Premium Edition II
* My Book Pro Edition II
* My Book Studio Edition
* My Book Studio Edition II
* My Passport Studio
* My Passport Elite
* My Passport Essential
* WD Passport
* WD Passport (Silver)
If your drive is new and on the list, I would try to return it and get a different brand.

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.

How do I back up my Boot Camp partition to external firewire drive?

I have a 15 GB Windows XP Boot Camp partition (FAT32). I want to back it up to a 120 GB external Firewire drive. (I know the backup won't be bootable). In OX X Disk Utility, I formatted the external drive as MS-DOS (FAT). I planned to do the backup using the Windows Backup utility.
However, when booted into WinXP, Windows will not recognize the external hard drive. I thought I might need to create a FAT32 partion of 32 GB or less on the external drive, but I apparently can't do this in OS X or Windows (since Windows doesn't recognize the drive).
Any suggestions on how to backup the Boot Camp partition will be appreciated. I'm mainly interested in preserving all programs and data. Ideally, a clone could be created that could be restored back to the original partition in bootable form, but from studying this and other forums, it dosn't seem to be easy to do this for a FAT32-formatted volume.

My goal was to create a bootable clone of my FAT32 Boot Camp partition, while at the same time increasing the size of the partition from 15 GB to 32 GB if possible. This is what I did:
1. As suggested in this thread, I used Disk Utility to create a disk image. I formatted it as MS-DOS (FAT), and made it 32 GB in size.
2. Used the Finder to copy all files from my 15 GB Windows XP partition to the new disk image.
The following steps were only to determine if the disk image is a viable backup:
3. Removed the internal hard drive with my original Win XP partition, and installed a new internal hard drive.
4. Used Boot Camp Assistant to create a 32 GB Boot Camp partition on the new internal drive.
5. Inserted my Win XP installation disk and started the Windows installation. Formatted the new partition as FAT32. (I used the long rather than the quick format method--not sure if this was necessary.)
6. Continued the Windows installation to the point of restarting the computer, at which time I used the Option key to boot back into OS X.
7. Used the Finder to copy all the files from the 32 GB disk image to the new Boot Camp partition. (This overwrote a few Windows files installed by the aborted Win XP installation.)
8. Restarted and used the Option key to select the new 32 GB Boot Camp Partition. Windows booted as usual with all files, programs, etc. from the original 15 GB partition. Windows did complain about "new hardware" and required a restart, but all appears normal.
This indicates that the disk image containing all the files from my original Boot Camp partition is a viable backup, and can be used to restore the partition if necessary. I'm not sure if formatting the disk image as MS-DOS (rather than Mac OS extended) was necessary, or not.

Disappearing external Firewire drive.

Hi friends.
My wife's mini has a LaCie external firewire drive attached. She uses it with Backup and it just suddenly disappeared.
It appears to be on and working- but not showing up on her desktop. Is there a way on restart-- to force her mini to look for peripherals it's not seeing? I always get such great help on this forum. Thanks in advance. Dan

I'm curious if/how that link worked out for you. I have been observing problems with Firewire/USB for the past month or more that I allowed my clients to upgrade to 10.4.9 and 10.4.10.
I am finally starting to cross over into the belief that an update within 10.4.9/10.4.10 caused a failure with external Firewire drives -- now I will include USB drives in that belief. I was skeptical for a long while but the coincidences don't line up.
My guess is that Apple updated the Firewire/USB bridge -- perhaps they even made it more efficient. The cost may be that various external drive enclosure manufacturers who coexisted (or even accommodated) Apple's previous bridge, now fail. I don't know if you recall the 10.3.x update that took down Firewires for quite some time to come. The only solution that worked for me then was to boot into OS 9, mount the drive there, and then restart in OS X. A very round-about solution.
So far, I have observed the following failures in the past couple months:
Powerbook G4 1.4Ghz (or so): failed USB LaCie hard drive, no clicking/non-harddrive malfunction
Mac Pro -- Intel Core Duo: two failed Firewire enclosures (Nexstar Vantecs). The drives inside were perfect but the enclosures ceased functioning first on an iMac G5 and then continued to disappear on a Mac Pro tower.
One of these enclosures had also disappeared from a new iMac - Intel. I could get the thing to mount and then it would disappear overnight -- my thought is that perhaps the drives don't remount after sleep? I did not do extensive tests.
I have had another client on an as-of-yet-unknown machine (purchased in last couple years) lose a LaCie Firewire drive... no clicks or hardware failure indications. I will investigate this week.
I had yet another client lose two LaCie drives connected to a Dual 1.0 Ghz G4 Tower. One LaCie drive enclosure seemed to fail completely at Firewire 800 speed and transfer slowly but reliably when dumbed down to Firewire 400. The other LaCie was unreadable even when I transferred the drive to another enclosure. I am still investigating.
On a Mac Mini (Intel) new enclosures from PPA Galaxy Metal Gear would not daisy chain without disappearing.
I admit that I don't want to believe that the recent OS updates could have caused this -- especially after the debacle of 10.3.x. But it is definitely possible and not altogether unlikely. Consider this discussion about a LaCie firmware update tool meant to make them compatible: http://lovemac.org/2007/04/28/external-lacie-firewire-disappeared-from-the-deskh elp/
Not having attempted the Firmware update yet myself, I cannot vouch for it. Firmware updates are not to be taken lightly but they are just the sort of thing that might make the Firewire/USB bridge in the LaCie's compatible with Apple's updates/fixes. Of course, that leaves the other vendors' drives high-and-dry.
Usually, Apple or Apple defenders like to say that the vendors should be writing perfect code and it's not Apple's fault if they optimize or fix code which breaks the vendors' equipment. I think this is a ridiculous argument. Granted, in our legal system, Apple would not usually be obliged to accommodate "faulty" code (even if they might happen to have been the originators of it). But what is the true definition of faulty code? In the realm of technology and computers, there are likely countless kludges and fixes and patches. The whole idea and goal is FUNCTION (ideally). Optimizing or standardizing code is important of course. It means that future authors can rely on the accuracy of the previous authors. But the world -- especially the tech world -- stands to gain more from consistency... from the language of the vernacular. If all the equipment and all the operating systems up to a point have deigned to speak in a consistent kind of pidgin, then it doesn't make complete sense to "fix" it to be some more "accurate" or "refined" grammar. Language works because it's locally consistent, not because it's accurate to some holy grail of grammar.
Specifically: Apple can't switch code midstream and say "oh, I made the code 'accurate,' not my fault if your stuff was built on bad code." Up until that point THEIR stuff was built on "bad" code too! It's a ridiculous argument but what can you do.
At this point, I imagine that Apple attempted to fix something with 10.4.9 and 10.4.10 that it had tried to fix before with OS 10.3.X. Instead, I believe it created an intermittent failure in Firewire/USB drives that leaves the drives inoperable as often as unmountable. It's just a theory based on having seen enough updates and upgrades have a really bad effect. I think people think we live in some future where we can trust our technology and tech manufacturers to get things right (or at least get things right often enough). Surely they're doing the best they can...no doubt.
I'm a little frustrated I should ramp down my expectations. I know. It's not like this is 2020 or 2050. It's really only 2007.
Good luck to us all.

HV20 Capture to External Firewire Drive

I'm here again, trying to help a friend who live in another country.
She says, "It seems that I can't capture footage from my camera (HV20) directly on to the external hard drive as my camera doesn't allow another firewire or
USB to be connected to the computer at the same time."
Any reason she would think this?
I know she's using a pre-unibody MacBook Pro with Final Cut Express. I don't know the details of the specs on hers (I will be asking her about that).
But shouldn't she be able to capture to an external Firewire drive? I'm thinking that when she plugs in the camera, the drive is no longer recognized. I'm in the process of getting more details from her.
Any help is very appreciated.

Of course she should be able to do it.
It should have 2 FW sockets, so she could use one for the camera and one for the FW HD.
Even if it had only one, she could daisy-chain computer, FW HD and camera.
A third possibility is to capture direct to the MBP's HD and then copy the media across to the FW HD. The media from a one hour tape can be copied in less than 10 minutes so it is no big problem.
P.S. I have a Canon HV20 and it never complains when I have 2 FW HDs and a USB 2.0 connected to my iMac!
Message was edited by: Ian R. Brown

How do I Daisy Chain external Firewire drives

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