OS X :: Creating Chain Of Two FireWire Drives Looped Back To One Computer
Mar 4, 2009
I'm wondering about drawbacks or benefits of creating a chain of two FireWire drives looped back to one computer. I intend to setup two external 1TB drives as either a single 2TB concatenated RAID array or a striped RAID 0 array to be used as a Time Machine backup volume. All ports and cables are FireWire 400.
The setup in question would be:
Setup 1 (loop)
Mac FireWire Port 1<--->External Drive A FireWire Port 1/External Drive A FireWire Port 2<--->External Drive B FireWire Port 1/External Drive B FireWire Port 2<--->Mac FireWire Port 2......................
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Jan 17, 2009
After a fiasco with two firewire hard disks (the courier company lost them), I have to purchase an external firewire HD. Once the insurance company refunds my money (which can take up to 90 days), I still want to get the other 2 disks I ordered. Is there a limit on how many firewire drives I can daisy chain? I was thinking on having all 3 hard drives daisy-chained to my iMac.
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Feb 1, 2009
My time machine drive conked out this morning, so I need to get a new drive, and I am planning on either a Western Digital MyBook or an OWC of some sort. (Any thoughts?) So here's what I'd like to do. Once I get the backup running again, I'm interested in running a RAID 1 with two external drives. But the catch is this---I have a late model MacBook, so I've only got two USB 2.0 ports. Here's what I'd like to know. Is it possible to chain things together this way: MacBook <--USB-- First HDD <--FW-- Second HDD That is, connect the first drive to the computer via USB (the only option) and the second to the first HDD via firewire.
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Jan 13, 2010
My MBP has one firewire 800 port and I have one external firewire drive. I want to get another external firewire drive but since I only have one FW port, does that mean I can only use one drive at a time? There are times when I know I will need to transfer files from one external drive to another. Is there a way to daisy chain external firewire drives together? Also, will daisy chain slow down the file copy process or even slow down my computer?
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Aug 9, 2010
Getting new iMac i7 in the next week or so. Looking to get a couple of hard drives both will be firewire. I will use one HD to store Music, Movies and Photos (I have about 500gigs worth at least) The other HD will be used to back up everything. I will be using it in conjunction with Carbon Copy Cloner so it will be bootable if I have any probs. Do I daisy chain the drives or get a Hub?
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Aug 23, 2010
I'm running two of these enclosures: [URL] each with 2x2TB drives in RAID0 (i.e. 4TB per enclosure). I use one 4TB array for my user files, and the other for TimeMachine. My user array is connected via FW800, my question is - is it more efficient to connect the other (TM) array via USB2 or via daisy chained FW800? The enclosures use the Oxford 934DSb chipset, which is capable of saturating the FW bus, so thats 100MBps. As i understand it very few interfaces are capable of saturating a USB2 bus such that practically speaking even FW400 gives greater real-world throughput than USB2, despite the 60Mbps difference in spec.
Since one is a TM volume, when backing up from the user array to the TM array will the data have to pass through the computer's controller? It definitely will if it's FW800 -> USB2, but will it have to if it's daisy chained FW800? I'm told this might not be the case as some FW controllers support P2P communication but i can't find too much info about it. Even if there is P2P support the OS needs to know the progress of file transfers and so forth so can it do this even if the drives are transferring via P2P or can it only monitor that sort of thing if the data goes through it's controller? Essentially is it up to the OS or the controller to select the optimal route for data? If it's up to the OS does Mac OS support FW P2P? That said, even if the data does have to go to the computer from one array and back through the daisy chain to the other array, is it still practically faster than the USB2 route?
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Apr 5, 2012
Bought the new iMac. I have one La Cie 1-TB external HD from previous Mac that I want to hook up to this new one, plus I want to daisy chain a La Cie 160g HD to that one. What driver do I need, and how do I hook them all up?
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Feb 25, 2009
If I decided to end up going for a Mac Pro with pure speed, I would want to fill it with 4 SAS drives. I've heard that SAS drives are completely unrivaled in speed (15,000 rpm ), but does this really correlate to high speeds? Is Apple's RAID card the best solution for SAS drives? I would likely use RAID 5 setup for striping benefits as well as data redundancy.
Now, I'm a bit of a storage junkie, and SAS drives won't be a viable storage solution for everything I have already (and even more in the future), so external storage would be a must. I have a drobo already, and it is a much cheaper solution than getting something like an Xserve RAID, and firewire 800 is plenty fast for streaming video, even to multiple sources.
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Nov 20, 2009
As the G-Drives feature two firewire ports, does anyone know if it's possible to use the 2nd one as an input device (as if it were a mini-hub for your Mac)?
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Nov 22, 2008
I really don't want a USB flash drive. USB sucks eggs simply because FireWire can do so much more (TDM, transfer speeds, etc.) OCZ was going to make a FireWire flash drive; heck, they had a FireWire 800 version built! Does anyone know of any FireWire flash drives? 800 is certainly preferable, since 400 is currently dead.
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May 20, 2009
Does anyone have experience with how well USB drives work when connected to firewire drives. I have a LaCie drive that has a USB port. I am wondering how well it would connect to a USB external drive?
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Apr 16, 2012
My Mac Pro is not mounting any new hard drives for some reason. The one's already connected work fine and remain connected (I have three drives connected via eSATA ports). But I can't connect any drives via Firewire 800 or 400. I've tried differnt leads and different ports but none are connecting. I've tried the drive on a different Mac and it connected fine. But on the machine I need to connect to the drives simply dont mount. Nor do they show up in Disk Utility or Soft RAID. I have restarted and powered down several times but nothing is working.
Running OSX 10.6.8 on a Mac Pro (2008) The hard dirves I'm connecting are Lacie.
Info:
Mac Pro (2008), Mac OS X (10.6.7)
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Nov 11, 2009
is there a USB 2.0 > FW800 adapter that exists?
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Dec 2, 2009
I have a real quick question about daisy chaining some firewire drives. I'm looking at buying an OWC Mercury for my macmini. I'm going to connect it via FW800. Can I then daisy chain a FW400 device to the OWC? The drive has 2 FW800 ports but only 1 FW400 so can this be done?
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Sep 6, 2010
Has anyone seen anything indicating that there are any new (higher capacity) drives on the horizon in with a 2.5" external FW800 format?
I'm slightly confused why many of the big brands have stopped at 500GB or 640GB drives in their FW800 models. The G-Drive Mini only goes to 500GB, while the WD Passport Studio stops at 640GB. WD do have 2.5" drives at 1TB, and have dine for months, but they're only available in USB2 models.
Any ideas why they all seem to stop short of their highest capacity drives for the faster interfaces? The only ones i can find with 1TB 2.5" drives are the Seagate GoFlex (which i'm not sure about with the swappable interfaces, i've nearly bought one a couple of times but then changed my mind at the last minute), or a couple of companies i've never heard of before who have drives way above the expected price.
Ideally someone will have seen news from WD or G-Tech or someone indicating that new products are on the way. Otherwise, i may end up having to get the GoFlex.
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Nov 30, 2008
My external drives transfer very slowly on my MacPro. I've been searching for answers and have turned up very little.
Just to make a note, I measured my disk speeds with both AJA System Test and copying files between drives and reading the Disk Activity in Activity Monitor.
I have 3 external drives, all MyBook Premium or Professional, 1x 500GB, 1x 1TB and 2x 1TB in RAID 0. I had them on Firewire 400 and the RAID 0 2TB one on Firewire 800. My transfers on FW were all around 24MB/sec on all drives (much less than what I should be getting with FW400). I then read somewhere that the FW bus on the MacPro uses the slowest speed connected for all FW connections. So I unplugged everything but the FW800 Raid 0 drive and my transfer rate jumped to 40-60MB/sec. This is much better, but still about half or so of what I expect it should be producing from an external RAID 0 setup.
To keep my FW800 backup drive faster, I've plugged the other two into USB2.0. The transfer speeds on both drives are now hideous, around 10-15MB/sec. This is so slow, but I'm not sure what to try to fix my speeds.
The HD's in the external drives are all 7200rpm, and all should be transferring at a higher rate. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Ideally I'd like to get everything transferring at rates they should be transferring at, but I'll settle with my current FW800 speed of 40-60MB/sec if I can get my other two drives transferring at a non-snail pace.
Is this a common issue? I can't believe I'm the only one plugging multiple external hard drives into their Mac Pro. I hope someone has a fix or solution for this. I'm all ears!
System: Mac Pro (early 2008) Mac OS X (10.5.5) 3.2Ghz 8-core - 16GB Ram - 4x1TB SATA - GeForce 8800GT - Dell 30" 3008WFP A02 - Gateway 21" FPD2185W - 3xMyBook external drives
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Feb 21, 2009
Macbook Pro 17" Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz. Following a logic board replacement for a separate issue. I have two external Firewire 800 Hard drives (two separate brands and sizes) which have suddenly started unmounting randomly and giving the 'hardware removal error'. A few seconds after unmounting they mount again, only to unmount a minute later with the error again. It is now doing this in a loop.I have done the following things:
1. rebooted and checked all cable connections
2. I have tried this with the two disks plugged in separately and daisychained.
3. I have tried two separate Firewire 800 cables.
4. running the Disk Utility.
5.installing the system from scratch on a freshly formatted internal disk.
6. reinstalling again with an archive and install.
Everything seems to work fine with a Firewire 400 connection.The only software setting that I changed is to disable the "Put Hard Disks to Sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver system prefs. Any connection? I have enabled this again and so far (a couple of hours) so good.Should I be looking at a hardware issue
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Jul 3, 2012
Can I attach multiple hard drives to my iMac chained by Firewire or do I need a separate port? I now have multiple Western Digital drives and find that sometimes they don't connect to the iMac so I'm wondering if I need a separate port or if my iMac FW port is faulty.
Info:
iMac 24", Mac OS X (10.5.6)
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Apr 26, 2008
I have a MacBookPro that I use in my room connected through ethernet. I am at university and they have only allow one machine to connect to their wi-fi that is available across campus, through mac address filtering. I also have an iPhone which I would love to use wi-fi on, at least while I am in my room lounging around and such. Anyway, the point being, can I use my MBP (connected through LAN) to act as a router so that my iPhone can connect to it? Essentially create a wireless network, so iPhone would find it and I could go online on it via wi-fi?
I tried going on Airport and clicking on "Create a network" (w/o a password), but I get an error saying "There was an error creating our Computer-to-Computer network." It doesn't say much else -- is there a better way of doing this?
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May 9, 2009
I connect 2 Iomega external disks and in the system profile I see them under the firewire tab.
I tried them on my macbook and it found them right away.
But on the mac mini they dont get mounted or it is like it is not proberly finding them What can be the problem?
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Dec 30, 2009
Is there any way to program a regular USB non-magic mouse to do the following:
1. Use the side button to go back to the previous screen.
2. Use the scroll wheel and a keyboard key to zoom the text of a page-- like the Command+ combination, not zoom like Control+scroll.
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Jul 1, 2012
How can I make flipbooks on my computer? The iPhoto program has a flipbook in the form I want but it is then sent on to Aople who converts it to a soft cover booklet and returns the book. I think Apples's marketing team are missing the boat for not offering flipbooks for sale. The one in iPhoto is very easy to use, and flexible as well. Nothing I have seen on the web is nearly as good. All I want is to make my own flipbook to keep on my own computer.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Aug 26, 2009
i was wondering if the following set up is possible (and if so, how to go about setting it up).
drive 1: my laptop, 120gb. holds all my documents, personal stuff, etc.
drive 2: 500gb wd passport drive. would hold most of my photos, movies, etc. this will come with me along with my laptop
drive 3: 1 tb wd desktop drive. can i back up both drives 1 and 2 to drive 3?
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Jul 23, 2008
I have a 2006 Mac Pro and recently my firewire ports stopped working (front and back). I did a little searching around found a suggestion to try resetting the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM by holding the Cmd-Option-P-R keys down while booting. I have tried this numerous times and it doesn't seem to do anything (i.e. the Mac just loads OS X and doesn't re-boot like the instructions say). I'm using a MS Wireless Comfort Keyboard for Mac. Can you reset using a wireless keyboard?
Since I wasn't making any progress with that, I was toying with bringing in the Mac to a genius bar. Never having used the genius bar before - how does it work? Do I bring the computer in and leave it with them? Do they work on it while I'm there? I don't have an extended warranty so do they charge time and materials? I'm wondering if that might get awfully expensive and if I ought to just buy a PCI-X firewire card instead.
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Sep 17, 2009
I am on Snow Leopard btw. I have a 1 TB external HD that I'm using with Firewire 400 and I've noticed that it seems to slow down my computer. Like for instance I'll boot up my computer and it will take forever for it to start up. Then, as soon as I turn off my drive it boots up immediately. Or I'll use Spotlight and then basically it gets stuck with a spinning beach ball and as soon as I turn off the drive everything is fast again.
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Oct 30, 2007
I have got myself in a very sorry state. I have a G5 powermac with two harddrives, one that the system runs on and the other that i have called STUFF and ....well has all my stuff on it. While on the phone talking i managed somehow( dont ask) to drag the STUFF hard drive into the Trash and it disappeared in a puff of smoke, and well... i need it back.
I cant find the HD within finder, but managed to find it while looking in disc utility but have not been able to drag it to desktop or anything like that.Anyway, if you have any ideas as to how i can go back in time and get my HD i would be seriously grateful.
Information:
g5
Mac OS X (10.4.6)
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Oct 3, 2010
I want to copy files from my old PowerBook G4 (12") to my self-built Windows PC. I've connected the PB to my tower's Firewire PCI card, put the PB in target disk mode, and Windows prompts me with the found new hardware wizard. After the wizard finished, I did not see my PB in My Computer. It does not show up in Disk Management, either. It does appear in the Safely Remove Hardware window as "UNKNOWN MODEL AND VENDOR IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device", and in the Device Manager as "SBP2 Compliant IEEE 1394 device". How can I get this to show up so I can backup my old files?
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Sep 7, 2010
I have an portable external hard drive that I'd like Time Machine to back up at the same time it backs up my laptop hard drive. How do I set Time Machine to do both drives at once?
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Mar 6, 2009
I have a 500Gb internal drive in my iMac, another 500Gb external drive (USB) and a 1Tb Firewire800 drive. Can I set up Time Machine to back up both my internal 500Gb drive and my external 500Gb drive to my external 1Tb drive?
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Nov 9, 2006
i am considering running a Raid 0 configuration on my Powermac 2x300gb drives. Right now i have duplicated everything onto a 250gb drive and have successfully booted with this drive. Does anybody know what steps i need to talk to Raid the two 300gb drives and move everything back onto them?
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