Daisy chaining two Lacie Firewire 800 drives on a G%

EyeTV 200 is a FireWire 400 device. From your posting it looks like you are trying to combine two FW800 devices and a FW400 EyeTV 200. I would expect that to fail as it is hard enough for most devices to chain without adding a change in speed to the connection too.

Place the EyeTV 200 on its own FW400 port and the FW800 devices on a FW800 port. If you do not have a FW800 port consider getting a FW800 PCI card if you have a PowerMac "Pre-Oct, 2005".

Michael

It's possible the issue is a bad firewire bridgeboard in the LaCie. Does the drive causing the problem work/mount alone, not daisychained on each of the connection ports? Is the problem isolated to a single port?

If you have problems with a single device, it can cause problems with each of the other devices on the bus. I believe that each of the firewire ports on the Macs share the same bus. Even the 400 and 800 ports.

Reading other problems, there seems to be a VERY high rate of failure on some of their drives. I had a similar problem with each of two Lacie drives I bought. Both were sent back and returned with no further problems. BTW, some of the symtoms you described were the same that I experienced...except I hadn't daisy-chained them.

my experience with elgato fw400 and lacie external fw800 is that they don't play well together on the same bus. My solution was to get two fw pci-e cards, one for fw400 and one for fw800.....all my fw400 is on one and the lacie's are on the fw800. This leaves the motherboard's fw bus for the camcorder (which also doesn't like to play well on the same bus as the harddrives). With this setup there doesn't seem to be any conflict.

What I did was get a Firewire 800 2 port hub and plugged my two LaCie 800 drives into it. Works perfectly, and thoughput is excellent. I read somewhere that you DO NOT want to daisy chain these drives. It causes reliability problems.

Jeff Weinberg

I've tried daisychaining a new d2 Big Disk Extreme FW800 and a d2 FW800 drive on my G5's FW 800 bus. I can't copy files from one drive to the other without an Error -36 code. I CAN copy to and from the drives to the Mac at nice fast speeds with no errors. Both LaCie drives are updated to their latest firmware, respectively.

The few times that I was able to copy a small folder from the d2 to the Big Disk, it took forever.

As a result of this thread, I'm now awaiting the delivery of a Belkin FW800 3 port hub. I hope this will clear up this issue, as I need to be able to move data between the two drives (both of which passed their tests via Disk Utility, Drive Genius, and DiskWarrior in flying colors).

I have noticed the older d2 FW800 has a lower firmware number than the Big Disk, however, the LaCie Update Tool reports that each drive is at its current appropriate firmware number. And yes, I ran the Update Tool independently on each drive, while the other was unmounted and unplugged.

Any advice?