Esata to firewire Daisy chain?

[Tony Brittan]

OWC (Other World Compuing) can actually install an esata card into your iMac for you I believe it gives you two ports. You have to send it to them but they are highly reliable and I’ve heard great things about how it works. I believe that what you’ve described would not work at all. BTW…GRAID is an awesome drive. I use em quite a bit. Sorry for any typos…posting from an iPad.

Tony Brittan
Island Shore Productions

[Tony Brittan]

Heck…I probably should’ve checked your link before I posted! That looks really cool! Might have to pick one up myself. You still can’t daisy chain like that what you’re talking about video and RAIDs and all that stuff. Just asking for trouble….if you can even get it to work. If it had all Thunderbolt disks you could, supposedly since I haven’t tried it, daisy chain till your hearts content. But not with FireWire.

This is why the Mac Pro is currently the best choice for anything large or beyond the imac’s ability. With the Mac Pro, you have 4 bays for drives and they’re super easy to swap out. I have 4 2tb drives in mine. Then you have 4 PCIe slots to expand with esata cards or whatever. One esata card can have 4 inputs on it. You get where I’m going.

Tony Brittan
Island Shore Productions

[Thomas Morter-laing]

OWC (Other World Compuing) can actually install an esata card into your iMac for you I believe it gives you two ports. You have to send it to them but they are highly reliable and I’ve heard great things about how it works.

—Yeah I’m aware of that service, but Im not based in the US and I don’t particularly feel like being without my mac for even a few days at the moment 😀 Its a possibility for the future but I also like the idea of my Mac being intact and having its full warranty 🙂 (Its also covered by Applecare- dunno how that works).

I believe that what you’ve described would not work at all.

— Why not? Isn’t that one of the essential selling point of the Sonnet Adapter? Or are you saying the firewire chain thing won’t work? Please elaborate if possible 🙂

BTW…GRAID is an awesome drive. I use em quite a bit.

—Awesome, glad to hear, its always nice to have reassurance a product is good (esp when you’re buying another one!)

Thanks for the reply 🙂

Tom Morter-Laing
Editor
Certified Apple Product Proffessional, 2010

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Thanks if you can help 😀
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Equipment (not for ‘bragging’, but in case it’s relevant to future posts :D): Canon 7D, with Rode NTG2.
iMac 27″ intel i7 3.4GHz, 12GB RAM, ATI HD 6970M [2GB GDDR5], G-Tech G-RAID 2TB (soon to be over eSata!). Elgato Turbo H264HD.

[Tony Brittan]

Daisy chaining doesn’t work. Well, not for video editing anyway. Thunderbolt is supposed to work great for that but the drives aren’t pllentyful yet. Apple is selling the Promise RAID on thier site that is Thunderbolt and has 4-6 slots for drives. Looks sweet! But cost over $1k US. sounds like after all of what you’re trying to do, the cost could be up around that anyway 😉 Yhey say though that you can daisy chain a bunch of Thuderbolt devices together and it works flawlessly. The device you’re looking at would be great for a MBP that has only one thunderbolt and no express card 34 slot…like my new 15″. That way I could plug this in and use my Matrox MXO2 via express card or even get an express card 34 adaptor for esata so that I could use my current esata GRAID with my new MBP.

But yea…your can theoretically daisy chain FW800 but it’s spotty and in my experience just plain doesn’t work. The speed throughput is very low, the connect is wonky, and it’s just not a good idea…especially for video which has a lot of demand for system resources and drive speed.

Tony Brittan
Island Shore Productions

[Thomas Morter-laing]

Ah cool- at the moment all I need is to connect a GRAID to the iMac with esata for much faster speed, so Ill buy one anyway 😀 Glad that it will at least work 😀 Other peripherals can come later, and for stuff which requires MATROX devices etc I have access to another Mac Pro (just not at my house). Good! Ill buy one for my GRADI no then, cheers 😀

Incidentally, know of any esata port expanders, so I can have more than one esata device attached to this?

Tom Morter-Laing
Editor
Certified Apple Product Proffessional, 2010

——————————
Thanks if you can help 😀
——————————

Equipment (not for ‘bragging’, but in case it’s relevant to future posts :D): Canon 7D, with Rode NTG2.
iMac 27″ intel i7 3.4GHz, 12GB RAM, ATI HD 6970M [2GB GDDR5], G-Tech G-RAID 2TB (soon to be over eSata!). Elgato Turbo H264HD.

[Tony Brittan]

Not sure on the expander. I think you’ll only be able to run one esata through this device at a time but that could be wrong. BTW, you’ll also have to buy an eSATA ExpressCard/34 adaptor to insert into the device you’re looking at before you’ll be able to plug in anything.

[Bret Williams]

Depending on what Sonnet card you buy you can hook up two esata drives or 4. You can’t daisy chain the drives off esata. It’s more like scsi in that sense. And you definitely can’t hook up a FW800 drive to the back of a graid that is connected esata.

If you hook up the GRaid via FW800 to your iMac, it will be significantly slower than your internal drive which is running internal sata bus I’m sure.

The whole thunderbolt thing is in its infancy and is going to be quite expensive. You’d probably be better off buying the thunderbolt raid system cuz as it stands you’re already going to spend $400 US in adapters and card just to plug in the graid via sata.spend that money on the raid, or get another graid for more storage and hook it all up FW800- which is fine for HD ProRes.

This whole thing is why many of us are upset about the possibility that Apple is dropping the MacPro.

[Thomas Morter-laing]

If you hook up the GRaid via FW800 to your iMac, it will be significantly slower than your internal drive which is running internal sata bus I’m sure
— That’s a pretty obvious point isn’t it? Don’t mean to be rude or anything. The reason I’d like this is because I obviously don’t want to edit from the internal drive, and every bit of speed I can get is helpful- Im looking at working with some uncompressed footage soon, as well as a lot of stuff from a Nanoflash (on EX3). As good as pro res is, I could really do without any bottlenecks when it comes to exporting and rendering out 16bit graphics 🙂

You’d probably be better off buying the thunderbolt raid system cuz as it stands you’re already going to spend $400 US in adapters and card just to plug in the graid via sata.spend that money on the raid, or get another graid for more storage and hook it all up FW800- which is fine for HD ProRes.
— There’s a thunderbolt raid system with a decent amount of storage for that price? Where? Unless you’re talking about the Lacie little thingy…which i don’t want at the moment because you spend a LOT for very little storage 🙂
— You can use 3rd party (cheaper) esata express card adapters (despite what connect want you to think) 😀
— I don’t need any more storage! I have over 15 TB at the moment XD

Thanks for the answers though everyone 🙂

Tom Morter-Laing
Editor
Certified Apple Product Proffessional, 2010

——————————
Thanks if you can help 😀
——————————

Equipment (not for ‘bragging’, but in case it’s relevant to future posts :D): Canon 7D, with Rode NTG2.
iMac 27″ intel i7 3.4GHz, 12GB RAM, ATI HD 6970M [2GB GDDR5], G-Tech G-RAID 2TB (soon to be over eSata!). Elgato Turbo H264HD.

[Tony Brittan]

Look at the promise thunderbolt raids on apples site

[Rafael Amador]

Yeap, daisy change THunderbolt is possible same that FW, what is not possible is this:

[Thomas Morter-Laing] “3 questions;
1) I gather its not possible to daisy chain eSata, but would it be possible to connect like this: iMac- G-Raid with eSata, G-Raid to other drives with Fw800… then continue daisy-chaining with fw800 as usual. “
You can not connect a HD trough an interface (eSATA, TB, FW,, USB) and get the same stream trough a different interface. If you connect a HD through eSATA you can connect nothing else.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com