Unusual behaviours since daisy chaining a new external hd

Hi
my mac has worked flawlessly since i got it over 3 & 1/2 years ago.
I added a new external hd by daisy chain fire wire last week & suddenly
odd behaviours are occuring for the first time ever all in the space of a week.
1. Frozen mouse - unable to use the pointer - fixed by un/re pluging mouse.
2. corrupted finder icons one or two - fixed by re-starting.
3. external hd icon unmounting when i do an action in a running app,
eg: turned a page in acrobat reader - fixed by restarting external hd.
4. put to sleep manually - black screen but computor & external hds still
'not asleep' - couldnt get the desk top screen to appear - fixed by re
booting with external side button.
A sense of things coming abit undone !
I want to trouble shoot this before it gets out of hand & i want to avoid causing any damage to my internal hardware.
Could anyone provide me with some kind of diagnosis & insight ?
thanks
d

hi
okay - in response to posts so far......
1. i havent used it yet with fcp
2. it is running off its own power supply, not off the fire wire cable.
3. i am not using any hub - its daisyed into the first external hd which is then
linked to the emac by fire wire. The chain is firewire 400 cable in all
instances.
Both external hds have their own seperate power supply .
JMVP WROTE:
"....This is especially true if the daisy-chained drive is drawing power through the Firewire cable. Daisy-chaining data through independently-powered drives is known to be iffy."
So what you're suggesting is daisychaining par-se is a no no.
Both in the case of the device powered via the firewire
cable AND if it's independantly powered.
Does this mean DAISY = DANGER ?
The verdict so far is that i should abandon daisy chains and switch to fire wire hubs....or direct seperate inputs into the emac.........
Aside from a debate about the pros & cons of the Daisy.........
i'm open to other trouble shooting lines of thought to my situation.
thanks
d

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New to daisy chaining my external hard drives need some guidence on this

I have 2; 3.5 inch 7200rpm 1TB hard drives, & bought some external enclosures with firewire ports for them.
what would the steps be to set them up?
some things I cannot seem to get a clear answer for even after Google searches is;
say I have drive A & drive B together, with drive A plugged into the firewire port on my mac & drive B plugged into drive A. If I only need to work with content on drive B, do I have to have drive A running as well? even if I do not need to work with it?
I notice in mac os that devices show up as no names, well if I need to eject my drives how can I tell which is which when they both show up with the same no name? I dont want to accidentally eject the wrong drives in the wrong order.
So to prevent something like this I would like to know if there is a way to get mac os to name each hard drive? say drive A would be called photos & drive B music. Is there a way to get windows to see them with these same names as well as in mac os?
another thing is I have windows xp pro installed through parallels on my mac & would like to work with my daisy chained drives in this as well.
what ever I do I dont want to screw up my drives, I have important data on them.
Message was edited by: Sossity

You can rename the drives to be just about anything you choose. That will help you to make sure that you are disconnecting the correct drive. As for the daisy chaining issue, I have found that even though the enclosures have the ports for this, I tend to see more issues with random disconnects. As near as I can tell, the Firewire port may not be providing sufficient power to drive two 7200 RPM drives at the same time. I personally prefer to use one drive on my FW800 port and a second on my FW400 port. Yes, one of the dries gets a lower bus speed, but for the increase in drive stability, it actually tends to perform slightly better overall since there are fewer drive disconnects under heavy load.
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Why can't you daisy chain your drives. If it's because the iMac only has a Thunderbolt port and you have Firewire drivers purchase the Thunderport to Firewire adaptor from Apple: Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter - Apple Store (U.S.)
OT

Can I daisy chain two Thunderbolt displays to the new MacBook Airs (July 2011)?

I have last year's MacBook Air -- probably the best Mac I've ever had and I've had a few. I looked at using multiple displays last year, but the reviews for the major 3rd-party solutions really demonstrate how little is possible.
I see Apple says you can double up on displays for the MacBook Pro (I have a pre-Thunderbolt one unfortunately), what about the new (July 2011) MacBook Airs?
Anyone tried? Anyone know?
(I have a 30" Dell display, but it is, and always has been, very flakey when it comes to connecting to a Mac laptop).

You can thank Intel for that.
The sandy bridge chips all have integrated graphics, and before they were released -- they took nvidia to court claiming they didn't have a "license" to make GPU chipsets for the sandy bridge line. Intel won, and consumers lost.
The solution most manufacturers are using for notebooks is graphics switching (nvidia optimus like technology) -- which basically uses a discreet GPU along side the intel integrated GPU, and switches between the two instantaenously based on the workload and \ or battery life -- this is how the macbook pro's with the ATI gpus work.
Since there isn't enough space physically inside a macbook air for a discreet GPU, and since no company in the world is allowed to make a shared GPU for intel's sandy bridge chipsets -- the only solution is to use the integrated graphics that is in the processors -- Intel HD 3000. Intel basically has the monopoly here...there is no legal solution in the world another company can provide thanks to our wonderful court system
Wanna know the really sad part about the Intel HD 3000 GPU? The Nvidia 320M (the GPU used in the previous model 2010 macbook air -- chip was released to the market in April of last year) actually out performs it in some benchmarks -- that's right, a 1+ year old shared gpu from nvidia outperforms Intel's 2011 integrated graphics.
Intel ***** at graphics, period.
The only other solution I can think of is for you to get the "Echo Express" product from Sonnet:
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/index.html
It's basically an external bay that will allow you to put a PCIe GPU inside it, and it would then connect via thunderbolt to the macbook air.
You would then use the minidisplayport connectors on the PCIe GPU to connect to the apple displays -- I believe any modern ATI or Nvidia GPU can support up to 3 or 4 external displays.
Unfortunately, sonnet's bay is not released yet, and you'd also have to make sure the PCIe GPU you get supports both thunderbolt AND os x....so yeah, kind of slim pickens right now
EDIT:
So apparently the macbook pros can daisy chain two thunderbolt displays -- Apple has a picture of it on their site:
http://storeimages.apple.com/1867/as-images.apple.com/is/image/AppleInc/MC914_AV 7?wid=1200&hei=1200&fmt=jpeg&qlt=95&op_sharpen=0&resMode=bicub&op_usm=0.5,0.5,0, 0&iccEmbed=0&layer=comp
I just bought a new mac air too...I was gonna get a mbpro but they are just too expensive -- the one I configured was at around 3000$
Wanna know what's lame about using the thunderbolt display with the mac air? So the new mac air has the magsafe connector on one side and the thunderbolt connector on the other -- they're not on the same side like the macbook pro is (see picture) -- so basically the cable is going to have to slack around the back of the macbook air -- who designed that? Must have been smoking some good meth ;p
Message was edited by: NiqueXyZ

Unusual behaviours since daisy chaining a new external hd

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