Ableton Forum

I'm trying to decide if the added portability is worth giving up a firewire port and more screen realestate. I have 2 SATA hard drives in my current set up that I intend to find firewire enclosures for, so I can use them as external drives with either a 20" Imac (duocore) or a 15" Macbook Pro. I also have a Firewire 410. My gut says it's a bad idea to chain those firewire external hd's after the 410. I have equally bad feelings about using a hub to share 1 firewire port among the hd's and the 410. The Imac has 2 firewire ports so I can use one for the 410 and the other with a hub for the hd's. What do you guys/gals who have similar set ups do about having only one firewire port on the Macbook Pro?

udp wrote:I'm trying to decide if the added portability is worth giving up a firewire port and more screen realestate. I have 2 SATA hard drives in my current set up that I intend to find firewire enclosures for, so I can use them as external drives with either a 20" Imac (duocore) or a 15" Macbook Pro. I also have a Firewire 410. My gut says it's a bad idea to chain those firewire external hd's after the 410. I have equally bad feelings about using a hub to share 1 firewire port among the hd's and the 410. The Imac has 2 firewire ports so I can use one for the 410 and the other with a hub for the hd's. What do you guys/gals who have similar set ups do about having only one firewire port on the Macbook Pro?

if you want the macbook pro: put a firewire expansion card in the Expresscard/34 slot of the macbook pro

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT A THING!

that is the whole beauty about firewire! you can easy chain lots of stuff from one firewire bus... i chained often a firewirecard (put that first in the chain) and 2x a 7200rpm HD without any problems, whatsoever and i know from chains of 4-5 devices. that is just one of many reasons why firewire is so much superior to USB.

and especially on a mac, because the firewire connex is propper complient with the standards, which is not always the case on PCs or cheap firewire PCI cards.

also the six pin firewire connex carries enough juice for creating, even long chains without the need of a powered hub, even with firewire powered devices exclusively in your chain. forget about USB, it sucks for audio or actually it sucks anyway.

cheers

Running them all in a chain is fine, that's what firewire was designed to do. iMacs only have one firewire bus anyway, so even if you have your interface and drives in different ports, they're still using the bandwidth of the same bus.

I've had problems with daisy chaining firewire stuff in the past, if I out a drive and my motu828mkii together on the same bus 8 track of audio brought the system to it's knees and crashed every time. I think it had to do with the amoutn of data the motu has going on the bus, it seems to be quite alot. Never tried two drives. If it works cool.

people *do* have problems with chaining, and people *do* have bandwidth issues as well. But like subFunk said, there isn't any problem in using a macBook - just get an expressCard firewire thingy (the LaCie one comes highly recommended).

studio615 wrote:I've had problems with daisy chaining firewire stuff in the past, if I out a drive and my motu828mkii together on the same bus 8 track of audio brought the system to it's knees and crashed every time. I think it had to do with the amoutn of data the motu has going on the bus, it seems to be quite alot. Never tried two drives. If it works cool.

I have never had any problems with chaining an 828mkii and an external HD, recording or playing up to 16 tracks (PB 1Ghz, 768Mb ram). Maybe the problem is with the 410.

udp wrote:I'm trying to decide if the added portability is worth giving up a firewire port and more screen realestate. I have 2 SATA hard drives in my current set up that I intend to find firewire enclosures for, so I can use them as external drives with either a 20" Imac (duocore) or a 15" Macbook Pro. I also have a Firewire 410. My gut says it's a bad idea to chain those firewire external hd's after the 410. I have equally bad feelings about using a hub to share 1 firewire port among the hd's and the 410. The Imac has 2 firewire ports so I can use one for the 410 and the other with a hub for the hd's. What do you guys/gals who have similar set ups do about having only one firewire port on the Macbook Pro?

isnt there a faster external hard drive standard now.. eSata at 1500 instead of 400 and 800 on firewire.. do a google search i am sure there is an interface out there for a mac in some form i have seen eSata firewire 400 and 800 and USB all on the same external hard drive case

dancing ray wrote:

studio615 wrote:
I've had problems with daisy chaining firewire stuff in the past, if I out a drive and my motu828mkii together on the same bus 8 track of audio brought the system to it's knees and crashed every time. I think it had to do with the amoutn of data the motu has going on the bus, it seems to be quite alot. Never tried two drives. If it works cool.

I have never had any problems with chaining an 828mkii and an external HD, recording or playing up to 16 tracks (PB 1Ghz, 768Mb ram). Maybe the problem is with the 410.

yeah, maybee the 410 is making trouble, and as i said the only problem with firewire is that lots of PCs are not fully complient with the firewire standards (are you on a PC or MAC?), i can assure you that it works perfectly well on a mac, if not, the problem lays somewhere else. 8 tracks on a motu (or any other soundcard) is a joke for firewire.

udp wrote:I'm trying to decide if the added portability is worth giving up a firewire port and more screen realestate. I have 2 SATA hard drives in my current set up that I intend to find firewire enclosures for, so I can use them as external drives with either a 20" Imac (duocore) or a 15" Macbook Pro. I also have a Firewire 410. My gut says it's a bad idea to chain those firewire external hd's after the 410. I have equally bad feelings about using a hub to share 1 firewire port among the hd's and the 410. The Imac has 2 firewire ports so I can use one for the 410 and the other with a hub for the hd's. What do you guys/gals who have similar set ups do about having only one firewire port on the Macbook Pro?

You can't chain after the 410. It's one of many issues with the soundcard. It says so on the site........errr........or it used to anyways.

[quote="eyeknow]
You can't chain after the 410. It's one of many issues with the soundcard. It says so on the site........errr........or it used to anyways.[/quote]

If that's the case, I wonder why there's two firewire ports on it then?

I can say that I used a 1.5Ghz Pbook with 1.5MB Ram and a FW410 and an ecxternal hard disk, and there was a horrid noise coming through the speakers wwhich didn't happen with the external unplugged. I abandoned that idea.

good luck

It's going back some years ( and dammit to myself........I should have written that down since I also thought of that) the official company statement was that they were planning on making that a possibility

If I remember correctly, the 410 has been out for several years......the thing that gets me the most is that they keep the EXACT same statements on the faq's.......but change the dates

Ok, anyways............you can't chain 'em unless there is some driver out there I don't know about.......

Thanks for all the replies guys! Looks like maybe the answer is the firewire pciexpress card. I'd hate to spend the money on a new computer then not have the set up work, so again thanks!

divi wrote:

udp wrote:I'm trying to decide if the added portability is worth giving up a firewire port and more screen realestate. I have 2 SATA hard drives in my current set up that I intend to find firewire enclosures for, so I can use them as external drives with either a 20" Imac (duocore) or a 15" Macbook Pro. I also have a Firewire 410. My gut says it's a bad idea to chain those firewire external hd's after the 410. I have equally bad feelings about using a hub to share 1 firewire port among the hd's and the 410. The Imac has 2 firewire ports so I can use one for the 410 and the other with a hub for the hd's. What do you guys/gals who have similar set ups do about having only one firewire port on the Macbook Pro?

if you want the macbook pro: put a firewire expansion card in the Expresscard/34 slot of the macbook pro

You may also want to wait until this Express Card to SATA card comes out?

Read some of the benchmark results between Firewire and SATA drives
Pretty gruesome, makes Firewire look like a total dog if you ask me... LOL!



D.

What about This Serial ATA ExpressCard Adapter
Check out review here
Kicks ass over FW400, maybe you can use with current setup.


Ha, how's that for timing ^^^^