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Daisychaining of external hard drives

Crazy-Horse

Crazy-Horse

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi folks,

I've been planning on purchasing a 1TB external (USB, FW400/800, most likely a Lacie Big Disk Extreme, at least i think that's what they're called) drive to complement my current WD MyBook USB 250GB drive. What I was wondering is, will it be possible for me to daisychain the USB-only drive to the triple interface one (does USB to USB work in this respect, or is there such a thing as a USB to FW cable)?

Also, on the subject of multiple drives, I currently have my iTunes library assigned to the MyBook... is it possible to have the library spread across two drives, while keeping it organised?

Thanks in advance 🙂
 
You cannot daisychain anything using a USB connection. Some devices may be able to re-host the USB device (this tends to be true of NAT boxes which run as the host) but I don't think so in this case.
 
Yeah, I guess it's subideal vs. having Firewire's speed, but it should usually treat you fairly well to have them both driven off a powered hub. 🙂
 
Firewire much faster than USB

With that much disk space, I'd strongly advice using firewire instead of USB. I had heard stories that firewire was faster, but didn't realize how much faster until I benchmarked it myself.

Firewire (400mbit) I can get sustained 36MB/sec, ie megabytes/sec. thats smokin and close to the ~40MB limit.
USB (480mbit) to the same drive I can only get ~16MB/sec. Less than half the speed.

Given that big a difference, I'd definitely go with Firewire. Its also impressive how reliable Firewire is. I daisychained a DVD burner to the above hard drive. While reading at 36MB/sec, I was also able to watch a movie at ~1MB/sec with no hickups.

PS, numbers here are from memory, I could be off a little, can double check tonight.
 
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