How many FW devices can you daisy chain?

Have a new iMac w/ one FW800 port. Need to daisy chain eight FW800 hard drives, two FW400 hard drives, and one FW400 DigiDesign Digi002 ProTools mixing board. I was planning on daisy chaining all the FW800 drives then coming out of the last of those with a FW800 to FW400 cable into the first FW400 drive, daisy chaining to the 2nd FW400 drive, then daisy chain from it into the FW400 ProTools mixing board. I know that's a lot of chaining but at the moment those are the devices I have to work with. I have A LOT of video and audio information I need to retain. Seems to me that I read somewhere about a maximum length a firewire daisy chain could be but haven't found any more reference to it when I just looked. All of the devices have their own power supplies so I don't believe they will be drawing much, if any power from the chain. Anybody know of any problems with this setup?

early 2010 iMac 27", Mac OS X (10.6.2), 2.8GHz Intel i7 Quad Core - 16GB RAM - 2TB Internal HD

Posted on Feb 23, 2010 9:21 AM

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Feb 23, 2010 11:22 AM in response to jmpeeples

Hi John

Depends on the devices in your chain and how far you want to go?

A FireWire cable can be up to 15 feet long and then you need another self-powered device like an External Hard Drive or Repeater/Hub to continue the chain on for 15 more feet to the next device.

While not very practical, but 15' x 63 devices = 945'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire#FireWire800_.28IEEE1394b-2002.29

Dennis
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Feb 23, 2010 9:07 PM in response to jmpeeples

Thanks for the info.
I've tried several scenarios and combinations what I've found is that I can put all the FW800 drives in a daisy chain then put the 1st FW400 drive in and lastly the Digi002 mixing board (which is FW400). When I try to add to this any more drives I get unpredictable results. I have therefore bough another 2TB external drive and hooked it up through USB 2.0 and copied many files to it from the older FW400 drives as well as the only FW800 drive that ever game me headaches. It should be noted that it is a Western Digital My Book drive. It seems like it would be a great drive having FW800, FW400, and USB 2.0 connections. In practice, however, I have had LOTS of problems both on my Macs and PCs I tried using it on. I recommend strongly that you avoid using any MY Book drives. I'm having better luck with practically any other manufacturer, including what I would normally consider no names like SimpleTech and Buffalo. Those drives seem much more stable.
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How many FW devices can you daisy chain?

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