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firewire 400 or 800 macally case

S

Sossity

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 12, 2010
1,360
32
I have been looking at these cases for my external or bare hard drives, & would use the firewire with the firewire port on my 2010 i7 macbook pro, the case comes in 2 types, firewire 400 & usb, & firewire 800 with usb. Which one should I get? the firewire 400 is cheaper, would it work with my mac's firewire port? is firewire 800 alot faster? if I got 800, would it work with the ma'c firewire port?

I am a bit new to fire wire, has anybody used these cases? are they good?
 
Firewire 800 is double the speed of FW 400 or USB 2.0. It makes a difference in backups, streaming movies, transferring large files, etc. It depends on how often you do such things and how important that speed is to you.
 
firewire4final.png


Firewire 800 offers up to 70MB/s transfer speed, double of FW400 and USB 2.0.
And FW800 is backwards compatible and will work with your FW800 enabled Mac too.
 
are there firewire hubs? like usb hubs? & would they work faster than usb hubs? can firewire hubs provide full power to each firewire drive or device? or do they have some of the same limitations of splitting power that usb hubs with usb devices have?
 
so if I had my 2 hard drives; one is 3.5" a Seagate 7200rpm 1 TB 16mb cache, & the other is a 3.5" hitiachi deskstar 1 TB 7200rmp 16mb cache in external enclosures with 2 firewire ports on them, I could daisy chain these 2 drives together? would enough power get to them both through my mac's firewire port? they are full sized desktp drives at 3.5" that I put in enclosures. What would be the maximum amount of full sized hard drives I could daisy chain together through my macbook pro's firewire port?

I read a little about daisy chaining, & from what I gather it seems the drives that are together all have to be turned on & running at the same time regardless if I need access to all of them at once. If this is how daisy chaining works, is this not the best use of power or energy? say I have 2 external hard drives; A & B, they are daisy chained, & both have to be running, but I am only working with hard drive A, wont this shorten the lifespan of hard drive B? since it is up & running as well every time A is on?

Also, what about a power outage or other failure? if all drives are connected & running wont they all go down?

Thanks for educating me on hard drives & connections, I have to keep in mind I am on a bit of a budget, my 2 external hard drives are ok now, I dont think I need to replace them yet, at least I dont want to have just yet, but perhaps get new enclosures with more connectivity for them like firewire, my whole idea of all this is to try & work with my laptops only 2 usb ports & to have my external hard drive connected directly to my mac's ports for better function & stability, & use my usb hub for lighter items like thumb drives & other peripherals.
 
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Sossity said:
so if I had my 2 hard drives; one is 3.5" a Seagate 7200rpm 1 TB 16mb cache, & the other is a 3.5" hitiachi deskstar 1 TB 7200rmp 16mb cache in external enclosures with 2 firewire ports on them, I could daisy chain these 2 drives together? would enough power get to them both through my mac's firewire port? they are full sized desktp drives at 3.5" that I put in enclosures.
Click to expand...
3.5" HDDs are not bus powered, thus enclosures for 3.5" HDD come with a power adapter.

What would be the maximum amount of full sized hard drives I could daisy chain together through my macbook pro's firewire port?
Click to expand...
Theoretically 63, practically 10 to 20, but the more you use the shorter cables you should use. I had once 10 FW800 HDDs connected onto one Mac Pro and the combined cable length was 15m or so. I encountered some problems and replaced the usually 1m cables with 15cm ones and all was well.

I read a little about daisy chaining, & from what I gather it seems the drives that are together all have to be turned on & running at the same time regardless if I need access to all of them at once. If this is how daisy chaining works, is this not the best use of power or energy? say I have 2 external hard drives; A & B, they are daisy chained, & both have to be running, but I am only working with hard drive A, wont this shorten the lifespan of hard drive B? since it is up & running as well every time A is on?
Click to expand...
A or B don't need to be running at the same time to have A or B being able to be worked with.

Also, what about a power outage or other failure? if all drives are connected & running wont they all go down?
Click to expand...
So will the Mac, but most external HDDs park their heads when being not in use (read or write access), therefore a power out does no damage.


Also of interest: https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=11872714#post11872714
 
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So if I have drive B be daisy chained to drive A, where B is stacked on top of A, and I want to work with content on drive B, I do not have to turn on drive A stacked under drive B?

I also notice in mac OS, that drives & cards show up as no names in finder, I read that daisy chained hard drives have to be turned on in a certain order from last drive at the end of the chain to the first one, well if they all look alike with "no name" in finder, how am I to tell them apart & make sure I eject the right ones? how do I name them so that I can recognize them individually in finder? I have one that is for just music, how would I get it to show up as this in finder? it would also be nice if it could have this name in windows as well.

Also, I will be using these drives on my windows xp pro virtual machine, how would the daisy chain set up work in windows? will it?
 
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