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Firewire Drives are piling-up… Help
I have so many Firewire drives… 20plus. At times, I may need access to any one of them.
Cables and Daisy Chains everywhere. A mess.
Is there some kind of connector to plug all the drives into without doing the Daisy Chain thing?
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6 Replies
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It’s called a hub. It doesn’t work well with digital video, I have heard.
Kevin Monahan
http://www.fcpworld.com
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro -
There are Firewire hubs but you are still sharing the band width. Only solution is a huge RAID system that you copy and keep everything on. No free ride here, you either deal with the mess, hook and unhook as needed or get a large RAID.
BUT… if your firewire drives are SATA drives you could buy a multi-bay enclosure and an eSata Card and you could get up to 20 drives that are all connected and this would get you much better performance. But you are looking at about $1500-2500 to do this.
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[Michael Sacci] “No free ride here”
Hi
Indeed.
I find beyond about 10 FW drives things get a bit problematical with my G5, and getting them to mount is a bit hit and miss – especially with a FW DVCAM deck as well.I’ve got a Belkin 3xFW800 port PCI-X card, with a 2-drive FW 800 bridge board connected to two ATA drives on each port – six drives in all, in removable caddies so I can swap to use the drives i need – out of the 30 or so ATA drives in caddies I’ve got holding my older archive.
Along with this I’ve got two Sonnet Tempo 8 channel SATA/eSATA cards running three additional SATA drives inside the G5, and a home made box of 11 external SATA drives – again all in hot-swap caddies.
So along with a couple of LaCie BigDisks on the Mac’s own FW800 channel I can run 24 drives constantly day-in-day out without ever touching the cables, just the hot-swap caddies (which are robust IBM server SATA bays, and Storcase IDE caddies).
But the cable swathe out the back of the Mac – held firm by multiple cable ties – is a sight to behold…I don’t RAID anything (except the LaCie’s which come in a two-drive concatenated configuration).
In essence I’m holding on in for a big (and affordable) RAID-5 controller to be made available to allow me to step up to the next level.All this has ended up this way because I’ve got an ongoing – low budget – job editing multiple programmes from a 2000+ tape archive.
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Ackkk. Been there. I got so tired of trying to keep them all accessible I numbered them, cataloged them with DiskCatalogMaker ( https://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA008942/library/diskcatalogmaker ) and put them on a shelf. Now when I need one I get it and hook it up to a hub on the desk. As you know all too well if the enclosures aren’t all same they have different connectors for the power, so you’ve got a boatload of power adapters, so I’ve plugged in one of each of the most popular cable types so there is power right there where I need it regardless of what pin arrangement is needed. I hope that makes sense. Sure makes for a more tidy looking work space.
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So, Hubs might work??
Can anyone share a Hub model that’s been working? -
Hi Blake,
This one has worked fine for me:
https://www.provantage.com/belkin-f5u526-apl~7BELW018.htm
Just a note, and this really only applies if you dumping large amounts of data from one drive to another – if you have any peripherals that aren’t drives plugged into your hub your throughput will be cut in half, so if you’re not capturing with a deck or camera or don’t need to have a deck or camera plugged in for an external view unplug it. Your transfers will be much quicker.
After buying 20 or so enclosures I stopped. It got nuts just like your situation. I just bought drives and put them in and out of quick loading enclosures. When PATA switched to SATA I started using one of these at each suite:
https://www.etech4sale.com/448485/vantec-nexstar-nst-d100ufs-2.5-3.5.html
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