External firewire enclusures and daisychaining

Untitled · #1 May 22nd, 2005, 01:26 AM

I have a mac mini, a spare 80gb 3.5 ide hard drive, and am looking at powered firewire enclosures to make use of said hard drive.

Since I also have an iPod and would like to use both devices at the same time, I figured it might be a good idea to check if anyone has had problem with daisychaining these devices.
Thanks

Ifrit · #2 May 22nd, 2005, 02:14 PM

I don't have problems daisychaining my LaCIE 40GB pocket drive and my gen3 15GB ipod.

Be careefull if you "link" a drive to a firewire enclosure with installed CD-ROM drive. It seems that the power consumption of some drives which use removeable media + FW enclosure combination isn't steady.

edit: It isn't healthy if other devices get "forecefully disconnected" during data transfer because the first FW enclosure + Cd-ROM is consuming all the power for itself.
It seems that earlier formac FW cd-rom/dvd/cd-writer models like to do this.

Darkshadow · #3 May 22nd, 2005, 02:39 PM

Hmm, that shouldn't be an issue with a powered enclosure, though. It should get the power from the plug rather than over the Firewire connection.

I haven't had any problems with having a DVD drive (read only) in a powered enclosure and having my iPod dock connected to that. Though, truthfully, I don't think I've ever had them both in use at the same time, so perhaps I just haven't run into it.