best practice for external drive?
A really basic set of questions, for which I ought to know the answers:
with four external firewire drives connected, three of them daisy-chained to one FW800 port, the fourth to a second FW800 port, do I:
a) when shutting down the computer, eject them, or can I just shut down the computer then shut down the drives?
b) when ejecting the drives, is there a particular order (eg, the drive that is actually connected to the computer of the three which are tied together being last to eject?)
c) when sleeping the computer, is it all right to leave the drives spinning and let them sleep when they realize the computer is sleeping?
d) when starting up, start the drives before turning on the computer? I've actually forgotten this, and started the drives after the computer was up and running, and it doesn't SEEM to have any ill effect, but am I doing something dangerous?
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2.8GHz quad-core, 12GB RAM