[quicksilverG4]

Are some or all of the Firewire and USB ports on the 2008 iMac on the same bus? Wondering about the possibility of striping across the two FW800 ports, possibly others. Not enough drives to test myself at the moment.

[Big Mac]

It looks like they're still on one bus to the south bridge:

http://developer.apple.com/documenta...loperNote.html

[mduell]

Note that one of the Firewire ports is 800Mbps while the other is 400. The Firewire ports share a 250MBps link from the Firewire controller to the southbridge, which substantially exceeds the combined bandwidth. The USB ports each have their own channel to the USB controller.

[Simon]

FW does DMA. USB doesn't. Hence the different interfacing with the rest of the chipset.