Mix firewire 800 & 400 hard drives

I am getting a new 21.5". I now have a 20" (firewire 400).
I have a G-RAID2 with 2 800 and one 400 firewire ports. I also have a G-Drive 400 which I use for Time Machine.
On the new iMac, I will connect the G-RAID2 with a 800 cable. But then, should I connect the G-Drive into the 400 port of the G-RAID2, or the 800 port via 6 to 9 pin adapter? Or doesn't it matter?
Thanks...
Rick

Just spent quite a while in the Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro discussion group and the video guru Tom Wolsky (I hope that's the correct last name) has pretty much instilled the fear of the Lord in me with regard to daisy-chaining a Canon HV20 camcorder wiith my external Rocstor FW800 drives.
The safest thing many people say is to connect any Firewire camcorder directly to the computer and not daisy-chain it. Even adamant about removing any other Firewire connections on the same computer using the computers' Firewire ports (Firewire cards okay on Mac Pros) as they share the same Firewire bus. Also strongly recommends turning off Time Machine as well so no interruptions to the time critical importing of video. That means on the iMac, I'll temporarily remove the Firewire hard disks and import to the internal iMac drive. I don't want to risk screwing up the video import or worse, the external hard drives...

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That is actually the thread that I was looking at earlier that caused my concern.
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Hi All,
I have a new LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Disk hard drive 500 GB - FireWire / FireWire 800 / Hi-Speed USB / eSATA-300 on the way, when it arrives I plan to use it as my Time Machine Backup drive with the FireWire 800 connection. I am currently using a Seagate Free Agent USB 2.0 320 GB external drive as my Time Machine disk. The reason for upgrading is the USB drive is slow slow slow! I am not concerned about the data on my old drive and will just wipe it clean using Disk Utility. What I would like to do is use the old drive to archive iTunes 7.7.1 and Aperture 2.0 music and photographs. Can someone give me an idea how to go about doing this?
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Hi Veena, Welcome to Apple Discussions.
And you've tried choosing the volume and pressing the "Mount " icon on the tool bar of Disk Utility?
Have you shut down your Mac and disconnected your firewire cable from both ends and let it sit about ten minutes then reconnect and try. Also, it is important to disconnect the AC power to your Mac, this helps to reset the FireWire port(s).
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[email protected]

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I want to add a 500MB external disk to a 866MHz G4. I have bought LaCie products before and had no problems so I was looking at their offerings.
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Thanks for all the info:-)
Both the LaCie external drives I was looking at are stripped RAIDs with two 250GB drives.
The Firewire 800 drive also has a Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 port so I am assuming that means I can use a standard Firewire 400 cable.
The LaCie SATA II card comes with the drive, has multiple ports and does claim to support booting.
I will check on the deep sleep issue with regards to the LaCie 800 card.
If I were to get a new Mac I would probably replace the desktop machine. I wondered if Apple would adopt SATA II in place of Firewire 800. I seemed to be getting the impression that Firewire 800 has not been very popular but external SATA drives are getting more popular. Plus SATA II seemes to offer better performance than Firewire 800.
I was intending to use the drive for video editing DV material using FinalCut Pro so disk performance may be more noticeable. That is why I was looking at striped RAID drives.
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Hi Veena, Welcome to Apple Discussions.
And you've tried choosing the volume and pressing the "Mount " icon on the tool bar of Disk Utility?
Have you shut down your Mac and disconnected your firewire cable from both ends and let it sit about ten minutes then reconnect and try. Also, it is important to disconnect the AC power to your Mac, this helps to reset the FireWire port(s).
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[email protected]

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I have 2 external FW 400 drives on my late 2011 iMac. I use an 800 to 400 adapter. I've been thinking of getting a new external drive from OWC. The have both 400 and 800. The 800 case has 2 800 connectors and one 400. Does it make sense to mix? Will they all run at the slowest in the chain?
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I have a mixed group of external drives, and just bought a new OWC Mercury quad interface drive.
The user manual that came with it says:
Note: If you are using FireWire 800 and add a FireWire 400 device to the chain, all devices will be reduced to FireWire 400 performance
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Mixing firewire 800 and 400

I have an older iMac (3.06 GHz Intel Core i3). I currently have 3 external firewire 400 drives daisy-chained to it. I use a 800 to 400 adapter on the back of the iMac to convert from 800 down for my drives. I was just looking at OWC and considering a new external. Just wondering if it would be worth my while to pay extra to get a USB3/firewire 800 enclosure instead of a 400. If I hook up the 800 directly to the iMac, then use the 800/400 adapter off the extra port on the back of the first drive to run the other 4 400 drives, will I be getting the 800 speed from the first drive, or will it be downgraded to 400 (speed of the older drives). If I was starting from scratch, it wouldn't be an issue, but since I don't want to loose the other 4TBs+ on my other drives. Hope someone knows the answer. I've heard conflicting stories on how this actually works.
Thanks

Just wondering if it would be worth my while to pay extra to get a USB3/firewire 800 enclosure instead of a 400.
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OT

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I'm not sure you fully understand how the hardware/software RAID system functions. If you create a mirrored RAID with either then you have redundancy for drive failure. This would be the case for either hardware or software arrays. If you create a striped array with hardware or software then there is no redundancy regardless of which method you use.
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RAID Basics
For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:
RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server: Hardware and Service Comparison>.
Hardware or Software RAID?
RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?
RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.
RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.
Pros and cons
Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.
For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?

Mix firewire 800 & 400 hard drives

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