We never hot swap, and cable's we've been using work fine with everything else, including a Pioneer DVD burner, 2 Sony DVCAM decks, a LaCie blu-ray burner, Sony PD100a's and PD170's and LaCie external hard drives.
To David S: we haven't tried using a firewire hub, only the patch bay, which just redirects single fw connections rather than splitting them up.
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