daisy chain firewire

[thatwasfantastic]

Hi, i like alot of us here are eagerly waiting for leopord support as i am wanting to trade in my g5 powermac for a macbook or macbook pro.
as the macbook only has one firewire port i was wondering if anyone had much experience daisy chainging an external harddrive with a 002 and if it caused any hinderance to operation in any way.
i really dont want to have to fork out the extra cash for a macbook pro just for an extra firwire port.
cheers.

[docscholl]

I have not tried this yet, but have been wanting to take my own 003 Factory out in the field with my Mac PowerBook and external drive.

So here's a possible idea (untested):

The MacBook has a FireWire 800 port as well as a FireWire 400 port.

Connect your 002 into the FireWire 400 port and your hard drive in the 800 port.

Again - I've not tried this, yet.
But it seems that this would work.

Keep us posted!

[docscholl]

My mistake!

You said "MacBook" and I was thinking "MacBook Pro".

You are correct in that the McBook does NOT have a second (800) FireWire port.
(And I'm scratching my head, wondering why Apple didn't add one).

A closer look at the 002 and some research indicates that you might be able to run your FireWire 400 from MacBook to 002 and in the second port in the 002 into the hard drive.

One source that alludes to this:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may0....htm?print=yes

Here's a portion from that link:

If you have one of Digidesign's Firewire interfaces, it should ideally be on its own dedicated Firewire port. If your computer only has one Firewire 400 port, as most laptops do, the question arises as to how to connect your Firewire 400 drives to the computer. The recommended practice is to make sure your 002 or 002R is the last item on the Firewire chain. If you daisy-chain drives to the 002(R) and for some reason the computer loses contact with the interface, the drives will disappear off the desktop and you may well lose data or worse, depending what was happening at the time.

[jhamrick]

You should be able to chain it.

I'm not familiar with the 002, so this comes from the 003 manual.

According to the manual you want to connect the drive(s) as follows:

Computer<---->Drive(s)<---->003

This way if the 003 is turned off it, would not disconnect the drive(s) from the Mac. Apparently this could cause data loss.

A closer look at the 002 and some research indicates that you might be able to run your FireWire 400 from MacBook to 002 and in the second port in the 002 into the hard drive.

This is not the recommended way...
MacBook<---->002<---->Drive(s) - This can cause data corruption and data loss if you shut down the 002.
The quote from the article even states that the 002 should be the last device in the chain. Like the example I used above with the 003.

[thatwasfantastic]

hey thanks guys, i knew you could do the daisy chain thing but was wondering more if it affected operation in any way, latency, errors etc.