Connecting 2 firewire devices to iMac?

[discofuel]

I'm thinking of buying an external firewire 800 hard drive to keep my audio recording projects separate from my OS but there's only one firewire port on the iMac and I already have a m-audio firewire 400 audio/midi interface (with a converter).

I've read you can connect multiple fw devices by daisy-chaining them.

So I assume I'd connect the fw800 hd to the iMac, and then the fw400 audio interface to the hd?

Would I see reduced performance on both devices as they're sharing one port?

How does the speed/transfer rate of a fw800 hd compare to an internal hd?

Do all hard drives allow daisy-chaining?

 

[tersono]

Yes you can either daisy-chain or use an external firewire hub.

A FW800 is still a fair bit slower than an internal HD for real-world usage.

 

[fhall1]

No...not all drives have the extra connector to allow daisy-chaining.

 

[drummerlondonw3]

true, but all the FW drives I have ever had, have 2

 

[Ecoh]

I have a hard drive and a printer daisy chained on the firewire port. The hard drive is used for backup so I don't know about speed. The printer seems to work faster going through the firewire than the USB port.

The hard drive is cabled directly to the iMac and the the printer is cabled to the second firewire port on the hard drive. The printer has only one firewire wire port.

 

[mike5411]

If you do choose to daisy chain the order is important in this scenario. It should go iMac <-> firewire 800 hdd <-> firewire 400 audio interface. If you put the firewire 400 device before the firewire 800 device, the firewire 800 device will not operation at full speed.