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Mac Pro Firewire Ports

C

capoeiraguri

macrumors newbie
Original poster
The Mac Pro only has 2 400 and 2 800 ports. and I was wondering if there was a way to get more, or split them. I have a lot of externals and an isight, etc.

Or maybe a solution is daisy-chaining harddrives, does anyone know anything about this, or how to do it.. I'm afraid to experiment with my data.

Thanks a bunch.
 
capoeiraguri said:
The Mac Pro only has 2 400 and 2 800 ports. and I was wondering if there was a way to get more, or split them. I have a lot of externals and an isight, etc.

Or maybe a solution is daisy-chaining harddrives, does anyone know anything about this, or how to do it.. I'm afraid to experiment with my data.

Thanks a bunch.
Click to expand...

Um... PCI Express card
 
Daisy chaining works fine. I had 2 drives hooked up to my Mini via daisy chaining before upgrading to the Mac Pro (now I have 1 drive on each) and it worked fine. I even would hook up the DV Camcorder to the end of the daisy chain when I needed to capture some video and it worked fine too.
 
I'd advise getting a PCI card.

But before you buy anything, do some reading on each of your peripherals to make sure there are no hidden surprises (I have a Firebox, for instance, and it turns out that A) it doesn't work with USB/Firewire card combos and B) doesn't work with a certain chip...of course I initially bought a card that broke both of those 'rules')

With hard drives there's no problems (that I've ever encountered or heard about at least) but it wouldn't hurt to read requirements/warnings on odd peripherals (like audio or video equipment)
 
Pathetic.

It gives you the impression that Apple is abandoning the Firewire standard the way they're treating it. Isn't FW800 backwards compatible? Why even include FW400 anymore.

Are generic PCI-e SATA expansion cards compatible or do I need some fancy one with special drivers?
 
Hi

I have a new MACPRO 2.8 GHZ machine.

I've always used an extra PCI Firewire card in my old G4 Mac. Helped to capture video to ext Firewire drives as Mac's can't / don't deal with two devices on the same internal firewire bus.

From research there are two types of PCI-e card available that extends your Firewire capabilities on the MacPro.

One has a chipset that is designed / developed by SiiG and another that uses a Texas Instruments chipset.

If you do a Google search for "MaPro firewire 800 PCI-e card" you'll end up finding both, at various sites.

It's a little confusing at times as those sites that sell the card that uses SiiG chipsets say -> compatible with MacPro, but then qualify the compatibility by saying, often, not compatible with Quad Core Chips.

I emailed SiiG and they said that that any PCIe card you find on a site with the confusing info, will work in a MacPro 8-core mac.

In the end i went for this card as there is no confusion with any compatibility issues:http://www.synchrotech.com/products-pcie/pcie-firewire-800_01.html

Anyway, I've installed this card and it works. I really wanted a card that gave me 3 x Firewire 800 ports, but it seems that 2 x 800 and 1 x 400 external ports is about the best you'll find on the market.

I've installed it in Slot 3 and I've installed a HighPoint RocketRaid 2314 ESATA card in Slot 4.

Anyway do a search and se what you can ind out there, mine works fine.

Chers

O
 
Seriously, just get a powered Firewire hub. I'm not sure I understand the issue here.

And yes, daisy-chaining works fine, Firewire was designed for it from day one.
 
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