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Extra Firewire ports

Grunze

Grunze

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 16, 2006
168
0
Hi,

I'm going to be ordering a new iMac next week and I'm concerned about only having one FW port. I often have more than one external FW hard drive connected and a tape deck.

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to add ports. I've found that there are very few FW hubs.. especially that have FW800 capabilities.

I know I can connect each device to one another, however, that is not efficient when having tom eject some drives and connect other.

Thanks very much!
 
You can easily daisy-chain FW devices and use one port. You can still eject some devices and leave others connected that are daisy-chained.
 
Thank you for your reply, but that is clearly not the solution I am looking for.
 
For me, I find it more more difficult. If I need to unplug the first drive in the chain and take it to a client for example, and I want to leave the other drives rendering or copying files, I can't do that, because when I disconnect the power and the FW cable from the first drive, the others will stop working. That is one of many examples.

In any case, all I'm looking for is a hub.. but it seems that there are very few out there.

Thanks again for the suggestions.
 
Grunze said:
For me, I find it more more difficult. If I need to unplug the first drive in the chain and take it to a client for example, and I want to leave the other drives rendering or copying files, I can't do that, because when I disconnect the power and the FW cable from the first drive, the others will stop working. That is one of many examples.

In any case, all I'm looking for is a hub.. but it seems that there are very few out there.

Thanks again for the suggestions.
Click to expand...

Duly noted, this one might be something? It's a bit expensive, but it seems to be a professional grade accessory:
http://www.nitroav.com/product/113/
 
 
joejoejoe said:
Don't the drives lose speed when they are daisy chained to one another?
Click to expand...

No, that is one of the beauties of daisy chaining them. I've had three external HD's daisy chained for the past 3 years. One with my Aperture and iTunes libraries on it and don't notice any performance hits.
 
rkaufmann87 said:
No, that is one of the beauties of daisy chaining them. I've had three external HD's daisy chained for the past 3 years. One with my Aperture and iTunes libraries on it and don't notice any performance hits.
Click to expand...

Awesome, thank you!
 
I have one of these on the way. Combo Firewire 800 / USB 2.0 hub. should do the trick nicely. The price is GREAT compared to most hubs that only do firewire 800.
 
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