Plugging a FW400 drive into a FW800 slot

M

Megakles

New member
Hi,

I'm the proud owner of a new iMac. I am eventually going to buy a FW800 external drive to store my footage on, but in the mean time I was wondering if I could use a cable like this:

http://www.buymac.com.au/product/firewire-400800-cable-2m-9-pin6-pin

to plug in my FW400 external drive into the FW800 port on the iMac, leaving the 400 port free to plug in the camera/deck.

Any info/thoughts from those who know more about this would be much appreciated!
 
I don't know about that cable, but most decent FW drives have two FW ports on the back and are daisy chainable, meaning you can plug one drive into the next drive and the next drive and so on and so forth, whilst only having the first plugged into the computer.

Check the back of your drive, if you have two firewire ports on there then plug your drive into the computer and your camera into your drive and it works just the same. I do it all the time and haven't had any problems.

Hope this helps. :)
 
you don't want to daisy chain your camera to a HD, final cut doesn't like that. It will probably digitize fine, but it will not print to tape well. using a 9-6 pin is fine.
 
Ya, go for the 9-6 pin FW cable. I've been using a 9-6 pin FW cable for a long time now and it works like a charm. I've been using it to connect my old Lacie FW400 drive into my old Powerbook Aluminum's FW800 port while using my free FW400 to capture footage from my camcorder.
 
Somebody gave me one of these last week and I was like WTF? (since I'd never seen one b4 and I have a lot of fw800) but it works fine with the drive they gave me and I have it daisy chained into another FW400 drive of mine. And just a word of caution, inorder to not BLOW out your ports, do not hot swap the camera or deck. Turn them off, plug in the 4pin, plug the 6pin into the comp and then turn on your deck/cam. Ideally the comp should be off too, but that's an inconvienient hassle for most. I blew out a deck and camera on the same day a few years back hot swapping them. You can do it a thousand times with no prob and then one day there's a prob . The manufactureurs (SONY, JVC) were like only fw drives are really hot-swappable. Static electricity seems to be a prob when hot-swappin devices with 4pin connectors.
 
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