Q: Can 2 daisy-chained firewire-800 drives be connected to 1 Thunderbolt-to-Firewire adapter?

I don't know but I suggest you try it and post back with the results.

Yeahj Apple wants you to buy all new external drives of the Thunderbolt type. They only updated the USB ports to USB 3 because they were basically forced to to keep up.

The answer is yes, as I have done this with in fact three Firewire 800 drives daisy chained.

More details on my daisy chain: I have this on a Macbook Pro Retina Display and there is a LACIE drive (FW800) connected to the thunderbolt adaptor, and two Seagate FW800 drives are daisy chained to the LACIE through FW800 connectors/cables, just as was typically done before thunderbolt..

Nightwatch (NL) wrote:

 

Thanks Steve!

 

One more question: Stayed throughput speeds more or less the same as original Firewire (since all my movies are on external disks) or has it become significantly slower?

I haven't done a careful side by side quantitative comparison of what I had on the older Macbook Pro (which had three Firewire800 disks chained together via FW800) versus the new Macbook Pro (which has thunderbolt into which I have connected three FW800 drives daisy chained via the adaptor), mainly because my employer supplied me with these computers and required I turn in the old one when they replenished it with the new one. However, I can say this -- one of the FW800 externals is used for Time Machine, another for making entire disk clones, and the third is for misc storage. I have seen Time Machine start up during a disk clone (with SuperDuper) and there seems to be no impact. The disk cloning is generally pretty intensive on disk and cpu resources, but thunderbolt seems to have a much bigger capacity for throughput than firewire and hence can apparently accommodate multiple streams of FW800 data going back and forth with no apparent impact on each other. The main limit seems to be the FW800 speed itself, not thunderbolt. I see ~ 60 MB/s or more which is as much as I have ever seen on FW800. Ultimately, the ideal setup will be thunderbolt drives daisy chained together, I would expect hundreds of MB/s, but I don't see many of these thunderbolt drives on the market yet. Even better would be solid state drives ...

I am unable to daisy chaing 2 firewire drives using the Thunderbolt to firewire adaptor.

I am trying WD My Studio II and a G-Raid. I can only use one at a time currently.

I have two Drobo 2's (FW 800) and while I can daisychain them on my newish iMac through the firewire adaptor, performance of the second Drobo has dropped significantly. I have not measured throughput or so, but I cannot sustain a 1080p video stream to my Apple TV anymore, which was no problem when the two Drobos were attached to the FW800-port (even through a FW-hub) of my 2009 Mac Mini. Streaming from the first Drobo (the one directly attached to the adaptor) on the other hand works, so performance seems to diminish down the chain.