General Question

iwamoto's avatar

Linking drives?

Asked by iwamoto (5277points) October 12th, 2008

i think my LaCie drive just died on me (i’ll be checking it out on my work tomorrow, i bet it’s the interface, lacie is pretty bad with that), so i’ll be getting another WD 1TB Studio, i really love the FW800 interface, too bad my MBP only has one port, now i noticed the drives have 2 FW800 ports, can i link them together ? it sounds logical but it’s not noted anywhere

thanks !

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8 Answers

jrpowell's avatar

Absolutely. That is one of the nice things about Firewire. You can daisy chain them. No need for a hub.

iwamoto's avatar

thanks ryan, maybe i’ll replace the 3rd normal drive i have with a 1tb too, i mean, yeah, while i’m at it, haha

just wondering, will it matter on the speed if it’s, for example the 3rd drive in the chain, or will it be just as fast ?

jrpowell's avatar

It won’t matter where it is in the chain.

Unless your are writing or reading from multiple drives at the same time they will all run at full speed.

iwamoto's avatar

awesome, i mean, time machine on a FW800, it’s the way it should work, and the WD drives are pretty awesome, power-on on connect, man i feel psyched to buy one tomorrow :D

richardhenry's avatar

I never knew about that! That’s actually so useful.

robmandu's avatar

I’ve recommended this before, but it hit me so hard, that I feel it’s important to keep mentioning it…

If you do daisy-chain your FW drives together, it’ll work great.

BUT…

If you need to use Apple’s Disk Utility to repartition any of those drives, make sure they’re connected directly to your Mac… not daisy-chained.

I attempted to repartition a daisy-chained drive and it worked… but the drive in the middle got zero’d out, too. And this was with Leopard.

I can’t really explain why, other that it must’ve been a bug in the Disk Utility. But the lesson I learned was that when you’re making unfixable changes to any hardware, make sure you’ve only got as little as possible plugged in.

iwamoto's avatar

thanks rob, i remember reading it, and last night i thought “yeah, someone told me to be carefull with it” that man was you, thanks !

iwamoto's avatar

yay, it worked, and it looks nice too, can’t wait for number 3

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