[mr. natural]

Does it matter how one links or dasiychains external firewire devices?

Santa brought me a 40gb Lacie hard drive and a Lacie 24x10x40x CD-RW. So, I'm wondering if it makes more sense to plug from my G4 into the HD and daisychain from the HD to the CD-RW. Is there any fall off of signal quality to the CD-RW thru 12' of cable, or other issues of merit?

Of the two firewire ports on my G4 I'm leaving one dedicated to my camcorder.

So, how does anyone else manage all this cabling arrangements of peripherals?

[OldManMac]

It doesn't matter how you daisy chain firewire. That's why firewire devices have ports on the back.

[mr. natural]

KarlG: Thanks for the reply.

I was assuming that it wouldn't matter, but I've discovered working with computers nothing is as simple as it seems.

Cheers.

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Originally posted by mr. natural:
<STRONG>Does it matter how one links or dasiychains external firewire devices?

Santa brought me a 40gb Lacie hard drive and a Lacie 24x10x40x CD-RW. So, I'm wondering if it makes more sense to plug from my G4 into the HD and daisychain from the HD to the CD-RW. Is there any fall off of signal quality to the CD-RW thru 12' of cable, or other issues of merit?

Of the two firewire ports on my G4 I'm leaving one dedicated to my camcorder.

So, how does anyone else manage all this cabling arrangements of peripherals?</STRONG>

I often have several Firewire harddrives daisy-chained, as well as an external CD-RW. I find that the order makes no difference, like it did with old SCSI hardware. Fast devices, or slow, they seem to all work fine anywhere in the chain. I think as long as the device Firewire device bridges are self-powered, there's no problem.

Somehow I like plugging my camcorder into it's own FW port though, but it still seems to work fine daisy-chained also.

One improvemtent I hope they make with the next version of FW, is to make it TRULY hotswappable. By that, I mean not have the OS gripe when you unplug a device without unmounting it first. I keep firewire cables running out of the back of all my machines up to a shelf area where I keep the external drives, so I can hook up external drives to any of my machines on the fly, and back and fourth from Macs to PCs. Having the OSes not gripe when I sometimes forget and unplug a mounted device, would be a great improvement.

Also hope they come through with the promise of truly self-networking Firewire devices. I'd love it if you could plug a chain of devices into 2 or more machines at once, and have any of the machines use the devices at once. Now that would be cool, and I bet it's technically possible.