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Daisy Chaining Firewire Drives
Due to the fact, that I always seem to need more drive space in the middle of completeing a video on a deadline… I have now acquired about 5 Firewire drives. I am having trouble keeping some of them online at all times.
The drives are LaCie D2 Big Disk Extremes and Maxtor FireWire 800 Drives (500 GB & 1 TB)s. They are all daisy chained from the one Firewire 800 port. Often, we shut down the G5 after a night of editing. The next day, some of the drives do not show up on the desktop. We have to restart a couple of times to have them all show up. Other times when we need to restart, we will “loose” a drive from desktop.
I can’t tell if its a bad drive or where the drive is at in the chain.
Any advice on the proper way to Daisy chain firewire drives?
Perhaps I should consider a different hard drive/storage solution?
Thanks.
Morgan -
4 Replies
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I’ve had problems with those large drives over firewire 800 as well. For me it was as simple as hooking them up via firewire 400, but I only had 3 drives going. The other thing you can try instead of restarting all the time is opening the disk utility and trying to mount the drives from there (they also might need a simple repair done which can be done in the disk utility as well). It sounds like you have a few terabytes of storage there, you should probably think about getting a RAID, it will save you a lot of headaches.
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I had not thought of just using FireWire 400 instead of 800. Originally, I needed the speed when I was doing uncompressed 10-bit at 26-28 MBs/sec. For the past year however, I have been using an 8-bit DVCPRO codec that is 7 MBs/sec, so I can probably get away with using the drives at FireWire 400.
You are correct, I have acquired a few TBs over the past year and it’s probably time to consider a better permanent solution. Permanent in today’s world, meaning a few years.
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Morgan,
Consider a SATA array. You can build a really nice 2tb array now for about $1200. SATA is much faster than Firewire 800 and much more stabile too.
DRW
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[David Roth Weiss] “You can build a really nice 2tb array now for about $1200.”
Amen! I just put together a 3.5 TB RAID 5 array for around $2500. And it won’t go to sleep like FW drives often do, which drives me batty.
Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog
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