Daisy Chain or Adapter (for firewire recording) ?

[tommusic]

Heya, I'm looking at buying a firewire external hard drive to record onto. I have a white macbook and a profire 2626 interface. Because my macbook only has one firewire port I can't just plug in a firewire hard drive. I've read about Daisy chaining and some people have said you can get adapters :s
what do you reckon? (the profire 2626 has two firewire ports) Thanks in advance, Tom

 

[zimv20]

daisychaining is fine. i don't see why you would need any adapters.

 

[tommusic]

Ok, would you recomend any makes? Anything I definately need like speed etc? Thanks

 

[jackerin]

Ok, would you recomend any makes? Anything I definately need like speed etc? Thanks

"Makes" as in specific brand?

Just as long as the harddrive has Firewire it should be fine. If the Profire has FW400 and the new HD FW800 you're gonna need an adapter cable (iirc), but if the new HD has FW400 a regular cable will be fine. If you have the Profire set up to use external power (ie. wall-wart) there shouldn't be any difference where in the chain you put it; I've got the Firewire Solo on bus power and I've set up my chain like this: Mac mini -> FW Solo -> HD -> HD -> HD.

The three HDs I have are two Lacies (one old Porsche nearly 5yo and one Poulton) and one that I put together with separate enclosure and drive (Mapower enclosure and Samsung drive).

 

[zimv20]

Ok, would you recomend any makes? Anything I definately need like speed etc? Thanks

i've bought a few of the OWC mercury drives, those work well for me.

min speed is 7200 rpm, min cache is 8 meg (though it looks like they don't even do the 4 meg cache drives anymore).

 

[noisegeek]

Why not just use your internal since your not recording too many tracks?