[Shanegrla]

So here's some quick background. I recently inherited my dad's late 2009 model iMac, which is a little more upgraded than my 2007 version iMac (faster cpu). After some considerable PITA, I managed to port all of my applications, settings, files etc. from my old one to the new one using Migration Assistant.

Unfortunately, as I was setting up my new iMac in my workspace I only just now discovered that it only has one firewire port (FW800). My old 2007 iMac had two -- a FW400 and an FW800. That worked perfectly because the Mbox 3 uses FW400, but my external drives used FW800, so I had 2 ports to plug everything I needed into the computer.

After searching around a bit on the forums here, I saw some people (also people using Macbook Pro, which has a similar dilemma) were doing a particular workaround which was to go using this chain:

iMac > FW800 cable to external drive > FW800-to-400 cable to Mbox.

However, my setup is a little more complicated because I have three external drives. In order, coming out of my iMac, I've got my 1st external drive (G Drive), which is my audio drive, my 2nd external (G Drive), which is where I keep my sample libraries (SD2, Battery 3 etc.), and then my 3rd external (Glyph), which I use for backups, etc. So here’s my chain:

iMac > FW800 cable to G Drive 1 > FW800 cable to G Drive 2 > FW800 cable to Glyph > FW400 cable to Mbox3 (the Glyph has a FW400 port also, luckily)

So I tried going this route using this configuration, and it does work. But I’m getting a lot of "Hardware buffer underflowed (-6085)" messages, asking me to either reduce the HW buffer size (doesn’t help) or remove stuff from the FW chain. I tried removing the Glyph from the chain just to see what would happen, and it actually made it even worse. I suspect it's because then I had to use a FW800 to 400 cable from my G Drive 2 to the Mbox, which I guess doesn’t play nice with the Mbox. My Glyph doesn’t really need to be in the chain, but it’s the only one of the 3 drives that has a FW400 port so I don’t have to use the FW800-to 400-cable.

Any ideas what I can do? Is there such thing as a Firewire hub or something I can plug into the back of the iMac so I can do a similar setup as I had before? Would that even work?