Imac fire wire question

S

s-audio

Active member
I purchased a Fire wire 800 external drive for my video/audio files for final cut pro7
and I bought a Apogee fire wire audio interface and now I think I may have screwed up.
How many fire wire ports are there on a Imac? my computer is about a year old and I thought there was also a fire wire 400 port back there. I hope so or I'll have to send back the Apogee.

There is another port with a little square in the center. is this a 400 port?
Sorry for such a basic, basic question.
 
which iMac is it? Does your external drive have two FW800 ports? If so you can daisy chain it. Connect the Apogee to the drive and the drive to the iMac.
 
Perfect! it has two ports on the drive. Will this effect data transfer rates when daisy chaining?
Thank you for your help.
 
FW will only go as fast as the slowest device on in the chain so if you plug a FW400 device into the FW800 HDD everything now runs at FW400 (assuming the Apogee runs at FW400 speeds and not at FW100 speeds, for example). Not all devices play nice if they are daisy chained or have to share the FW bus so there may be complications.

W/that being said, you won't hurt anything by trying it out and seeing if it works.


-Andrew
 
adkimery said:
FW will only go as fast as the slowest device on in the chain so if you plug a FW400 device into the FW800 HDD everything now runs at FW400.
Click to expand...

This is not necessarily true. For example, I have 2 CalDigit VRMinis daisy chained and they share the bandwidth. If only one of the VRMinis is being accessed at a time, that VRMini will get the maximum bandwidth (the 2nd one will be a little bit slower). If both VRMinis are being accessed at the same time, the VRMinis will share the bandwidth (in 60/40 or 55/45 ratio). For example: if the maximum FW800 speed is around 70MB/s, the first VRMini will run around 40Mb/s, while the other VRMini will only run around 30MB/s.
 
But you have both drives connected via FW800 right? I wasn't talking about sharing bandwidth I was talking about if you mix FW400 and FW800 devices in a daisy chain the whole chain will only operate at FW400 speeds.
 
adkimery said:
But you have both drives connected via FW800 right? I wasn't talking about sharing bandwidth I was talking about if you mix FW400 and FW800 devices in a daisy chain the whole chain will only operate at FW400 speeds.
Click to expand...

The two drives are daisy chained. The first drive is hooked-up to an iMac via FW 800. The second drive is then connected to the first drive via FW400.
 
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