daisy chaining firewire 800 drives

[Jeff Carpenter]

Do you use them all at the same time?

I’ve had many firewire drives daisy-chained in the past but because I only used 1 or 2 at a time it wasn’t a problem. The ones you aren’t using just pass the information through without getting involved.

But if you are using 3 or 4 of them at the same time then, yes, you should get some kind of card to attach half of them to.

[David Roth weiss]

[cls105] “or am i fine daisy chaining. just seems like a bad idea to me to connect that many drives to one port.”

With hard drive prices sinking to incredible all time lows, at some point you might really want to consider making the switch to a SATA array with swappable drives. SATA drives are much, much faster than even Firewire 800 and much more reliable too. Firewire was great in its day, and they’re still terrific for transporting files to other facilities, but nowadays, when you go into a studio and see a whole load of daisy chained firewire drives piled about, it looks kinda “high school.”

DRW

[Ralph Bertini]

What type of sata array would you consider?

[David Roth weiss]

[creatureteacher] “What type of sata array would you consider?”

I have both a two drive and four drive enclosure from Firmtek. They have both performed flawlessly. However, there are a few newer 5-bay enclosures from companies such as Sonnet and Wiebetech that look very nice, especially as they utilize newer faster SATA controllers that require just one cable connected to the computer.

As far as the drives to put inside, Hitachi is coming out with new 1-terrbayte hard drives soon, but all the major manufacturers are making superb drives now. Just be certain to get the ones that carry 3 or five year warranties.

DRW

[Cee Dee]

thanks for the input.. i need to get paid for this job and just take out all the drives inside of these enclosures… i like the sata array idea. its just not good for shared storage. things to consider. have a good weekend