Firewire Ports

[Thidranki]

I have a powerbook and just ran out of HD space, so I got an external HD. My dilema is that there is only one firewire port on the powerbook, and I read that a camera, for best quality, needs to be connected to the computer via firewire, and a hadrive, for best quality and speed, needs to be connected as well to a firewire.

So, should I get a card with more firewire ports, or would it be ok to attatch my hard drive to a Firewire 400/USB port?

 

[superbovine]

get a firewire hub

 

[evil_santa]

if your FW drive has 2 ports on it you can daisy chain the camera through the FW Drive into the Laptop.

 

[kgarner]

if your FW drive has 2 ports on it you can daisy chain the camera through the FW Drive into the Laptop.

What he said. My set up is Mini > FW HD > FW HD > Camera. Works fine with no problems.

 

[grapes911]

Daisy chaining is a huge advantage of Firewire. Example: Assume your hard drive is connected to your computer and you camera is connected to you hard drive. Because the was firewire has its own controller chip, when you transfer from your camera to your hard drive, most of the data will never even have to go into the computer. Meaning the data will transfer from the camera directly to the hard drive. This can speed things up considerable. You can hook up to 63 devices this way.