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firewire daisy chain limits?
Does anyone know if there is a limit to how many firwire drives we can daisy chain? We are using FCP 4.5 on a G5.
Any thoughts in general about daisy chaining?
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6 Replies
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3 or 4 seems about “the norm” but you can TRY as many as you like.
Each system is a bit different.
If you NEED more drives, it makes sense to add another FW CARD (with several ports) to handle them.
Another method is to only use a certain number of drives AT A TIME.
And only patch in the ones you need for a given project.
Keep in mind that FW drives are NOT officially SANCTIONED by Apple for use with FCP.
Thousands of editors USE them, but they are not “guaranteed” or even “expected” to perform up to full spec. like an INTERNAL drive. -
We’ve got about 8 drives. We need them all for this project.
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Keep yor connection cables as short as possible. We have twelve FW drives running on a G4 OS 9.2.2 without problems.
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Not to sound really dumb, but, when you say to keep the connection cables as short as possible, do you mean the physical legnth of the cord?
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First of all, you should get a firewire PCI card. It will give you some more options since it will be seperate from the Mac’s built-in ports and will help split up the signal.
Second, be smart about how you link them. Don’t just put them all in a row. Think about HOW you use the drives. For example, I have 2 RAIDs each containing 2 drives. The way I edit I’m either using 1 RAID as the scratch disc OR the other. So this is what I did:
https://www.penguintail.com/drives.jpg
So no matter if I pick RAID A or RAID B I’m getting pretty much the same performance. (And it’s the best performance I can get out of them because of the PCI card.)
Obviously that’s not exactly what you’d do, but my point is to just think about which drives you use and when. If you have 2 drives working at once on the PCI card and all the drives plugged into the computer’s port are asleep, you’re wasting resources. I’m sure you can work out a plan that makes 8 drives manageable.
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Yes, keep the physical length of the cord as short as possible. Apple makes some short FW cables that are perfect.
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