Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Daisy Chaining to Thunderbolt

I think my answer is FW800 to FW800 to FW800 to Thunderbolt. I can link the three externals aSATA but I cannot get that into Thunderbolt, right? Is it better to go USB2 to USB2 to USB2 to Thunderbolt? The first two drives, the smaller ones, only have mini USB. The closest one is my Time Machine Drive, the 2TB.

Firewire 800 is easily faster than USB 2. That would certainly be my choice in your situation. USB 3 is a different kettle of fish.

I think the trouble with FW800 is you might need to have something other than a simple connector, I think you need a converter, several hundred dollars. I think the only converter from Thunderbolt to FW is for FW400? Not sure. I tried calling Avastor but they haven't been in.

BTW, Happy New Year and much thanks to you, JoeMikeB, as well as Dianne, Tacit, MMTech3, Artie505, Virtual1, Ganbustein, jchuzi and dkmarsh. My 'A' Team.

-Slo

This $29.00 doodad may be your answer. (Read the reviews.)


Edit: Thanks for the good wishes, and the best to you for the new year!

I don't know about Artie's doodad, but Apple sells a Thunderbolt to FW adapter. I use it to daisy chain FW 800-FW 800-FW 400, with the the first 800 going into the adapter.

Works with no problems and was $25-$30 as well.

That's my doodad, Ira. (That's why I quoted Apple. )

Since you're using the thing I'll ask you a question: At least one commenter on the Apple page to which I linked had an issue with running external drives on bus power. Do you have any such problems?

I have a bunch of portable Firewire 800 Drives that I run off that connector and have zero issues and have never used any other power supply

Thanks for weighing in; that should be helpful to slolerner, but, specifically, are you daisy chaining?

Ira's running close to the same setup slolerner wants to run, so his feedback may be more to the point.

no daisy chaining. I have a regular hard drive that I use with Time Machine that has a power supply that I have daisy chained with, but that is plugged straight into the Firewire 800 port. I have OWC and G-Tech portables that have the ability to be plugged into a power source. I wonder if the the first one were plugged in if that would transfer enough power to daisy chain

All my drives are powered. Ok, I'm going with the FW800 to Thunderbolt adapter as the final link of the daisy chain and will let you know.

All of the drives in my chain have their own power source (i.e., plugged into an outlet with a power cord), so I can't address the question of bus power.

FWIW, I hook thunderbolt to firewire somewhat frequently. Make the thunderbolt connection to the TB port the last one to plug in.

More than once I've had the TB/fw drivers go out to lunch on me though, requiring a reboot. Apple had no help to offer on this other than restarting. So don't unplug TB before unplugging FW

I have an external Firewire 800 drive enclosure connected to the Firewire 800 port on my Thunderbolt monitor which in turn is connected to the Mac mini only via Thunderbolt. I have had no connection problems and benchmarks show that it is as fast there as connected directly to the Mac mini. I do not see any technical issue whether the Thunderbolt connection is to a $29 adaptor or a $999 monitor. Since both Thunderbolt and Firewire can be daisy-chained there is no reason to think connecting it to the computer through a Thunderbolt port should have any effect on that. Whether there are enough amps for bus powered devices or not is an entirely separate matter.