Daisy-chaining hard drive & audio interface?

[discofuel]

I have an iMac with one FW 800 port and a FW Apogee Duet audio interface.

I want to buy a Lacie FW800 hard drive so my only option is to daisy-chain it.

Will there be a loss of performance by doing this?

Also, daisy-chaining aside is an FW 800 drive as good performance as an internal hard disk?

Thanks

 

[DannyBres]

Depends on the internal drive, an internal SATA SSD will blow the FW800 HDD out of the water, if both drives are 7200rpm drives, i believe their performance is quite comparable!

I am not sure how daisey chaining affects performance but it id your only option to connect then 2 devices!

Or get a new Thunderbolt MBP, once device start coming out!

 

[mjsmke]

Your audio interface should still work.

Daisy chaining works well. The only loss in performance you will notice is if/when you are reading/writing to/from 2 or more drives at the same time.

Think of a multi lane motorway going down to a single lane. (The single lane being the FW800 cable). If just one drive is in use it will run at up to 800Mb/s. If you use more than one drive at once the speed of the drives will be a combined speed of 800Mb/s. For example 2 drives at 400Mb/s each on average.

 

[discofuel]

The new iMacs will have Thunderbolt but I only bought mine about 6 months ago so can't justify an upgrade yet

Wonder if it's possible to replace the superdrive with a SSD for the system, then upgrade my internal hd to 2tb. probably void my applecare though!

 

[discofuel]

Your audio interface should still work.

Daisy chaining works well. The only loss in performance you will notice is if/when you are reading/writing to/from 2 or more drives at the same time.

Think of a multi lane motorway going down to a single lane. (The single lane being the FW800 cable). If just one drive is in use it will run at up to 800Mb/s. If you use more than one drive at once the speed of the drives will be a combined speed of 800Mb/s. For example 2 drives at 400Mb/s each on average.

Thanks mjsmke - so the audio interface won't require much bandwidth? it's fw 400.

 

[DannyBres]

It is possible to replace the SuperDrive with an SSD. However, if you iMac is 6 months old, it will have 3 SATA sockets on the logic board, 1 for a HDD, 1 for your superdrive and 1 for an optional SSD, the empty socket is a bit fiddly to get to tho!

If the soundcard is FW400, that is a new kettle of fish as everything will run over FW400!

so 200mb/s in average if they are both active!

 

[mjsmke]

It should be fine with just the 2 devices in the chain. If you have lots of other drives in the chain it may cause a performance issue.

Also depends on how much the external drive is in use. If its just for small files like playing music you will be fine. If its constantly reading/writing it could cause you audio device to slow down but i think it will be fine.

 

[discofuel]

It is possible to replace the SuperDrive with an SSD. However, if you iMac is 6 months old, it will have 3 SATA sockets on the logic board, 1 for a HDD, 1 for your superdrive and 1 for an optional SSD, the empty socket is a bit fiddly to get to tho!

If the soundcard is FW400, that is a new kettle of fish as everything will run over FW400!

so 200mb/s in average if they are both active!

Oh there's already a spare SATA socket? So is there a way to install a SSD without removing the internal hd or superdrive?

In terms of the daisy chaining I was planning to run the fw 800 hd first in the chain, then connect the soundcare to that

 

[discofuel]

It should be fine with just the 2 devices in the chain. If you have lots of other drives in the chain it may cause a performance issue.

Also depends on how much the external drive is in use. If its just for small files like playing music you will be fine. If its constantly reading/writing it could cause you audio device to slow down but i think it will be fine.

I will be recording to it so constantly reading and writing large audio files.

Installing a SSD for the system files and then upgrading my internal hd seems the best option

 

[skiltrip]

On the iMac, you may have to make sure you put the audio interface first in the chain. With my iMac i7 I had to do this. When I had my drive first in the chain I got errors in Pro Tools 9.

 

[dougb256]

I'm using a 2006 iMac with 3 external FW drives and an Apogee Ensemble. Absolutely no problems. 1 drive is a 2TB boot drive; 1 is a 1TB audio drive; the last is another 1TB drive that backs up the audio drive.