firewire daisy chaining question

[bniu]

As a user of several hard drives that are all creeping up there in age, I'm looking to consolidate. I do have a need for the mobile external hard drives as I like to move around a lot and ease of use is essential.

I'm interested in the Western Digital My Passport Studio series
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...BSWO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331518063&sr=8-1

and I noticed that there are two firewire ports on the drive for daisy chaining. My question is, how many of these can I daisy chain off of my 17" MBP's firewire 800 port? Can I get at least 3-4 chained together?

I know usb drives are cheaper but I prefer the performance of Firewire and I have other uses for my USB ports. Thanks.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Theoretically up to 63 devices, practically at least twelve if you use short Firewire cables.

I once had twelve FW HDDs connected to one FW port, each HDD was connected via one 150 cm FW cable, which amounts to 18 m of cables. It worked okay, but sometimes HDDs didn't mount correctly. I did buy short FW cables (30 cm) and it then worked out okay.
But with four FW devices, 6 m shouldn't be problematic.