Is it faster to transfer between two hard drives if they are daisy chained via Firewire 800 or between them if one drive is hooked up to firewire 800 the other drive is hooked up to USB 2.0?

When daisy chaining the data transfers through the interface, not the device. This means there won’t be a speed hit at all. Since Firewire is faster than USB 2.0 the daisy chain will always be faster.

@cawlin That’s one of the best answers I’ve gotten on the process- so if computer A is hooked via FW to hard drive B and hard drive B is daisy chained via FW to hard drive C- the data is just travelling from harddrive B to C with instructions from A? Or is going from B to A and back to C? I think you answered this but I’m a little confused by the terminology.

Re-read your answer- additional question- regardless of my “path of the data” question above- are you saying that because the firewire drive are on the same bus this will be faster than using two separate buses hooked up to the computer (i.e. Firewire and USB)? Trying to understand the difference between interface and device- here interface would mean the bus and device would mean the computer?

Data doesn’t actually pass through the computer, it simply goes from B to C.

Daisy chaining doesn’t help or hinder speed. If you were to hook up two firewire drives into two separate firewire ports the data transfer would be the same speed as the daisy chain. Magic!

Hope this clears it up

That is magic! I always knew firewire was magic.