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Posted By: artie505 Daisy-chaining - 04/10/13 07:58 PM
I just bought a "new" MBP i7 to replace my MacBook ( cool ), and I'm going to want to transfer data between the two, but the i7 has a FW 800 port and the MB has only a FW 400 port.

Do I have to buy a FW 400/800 adapter, or can I can I daisy-chain the MB in FW target disk mode into the FW 400 port on my G-Drive Mini and out its FW 800 port?

Seems like the answer should be yes, but I'd like to be certain so I can order an adapter quickly if necessary.

Thanks.
Posted By: tacit Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 05:38 AM
Wow. That's a really good question. It depends on how the FW controller in your G-Drive works. My suspicion--and this is just a gut feeling--is that daisy chaining won't work; the combo FW 400/800 drives I've seen are either/or. But it might.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 05:50 AM
Thanks!

I guess my best bet now will be to get in touch with the mfr.

I'll post back.

Afterthought: I'm certain that I've read (here, in all likelihood) that you can daisy-chain an external FW-400 through an 800, and vice-versa (although with loss of throughput); how does this situation differ (or am I misremembering)?

Edit: I guess it's because both the in and out ports on the other drives are the same, i.e. both 400 or 800, as opposed to mine on which the in and out differ?
Posted By: freelance Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 08:04 AM
I have a Mac Pro with a FW800 port. I can daisy chain a LaCie 800 drive that has a FW400 port with another LaCie FW400 drive. Both work - I've never bothered to measure the speed.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 08:36 AM
Thanks for the input. It's positive, but it may be a drive by drive thing; I'm going to call G-Drive mini tech support later and see what they've got to say.

I could clone to the G-Drive and import from it, but I'd rather skip the middle step and go directly from deuced Mac(hina) to deuced Mac(hina), and if I can't do it with a daisy-chain it means either a 7 day wait for an adapter or a trip to Manhattan. frown
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 09:44 AM

No ethernet cable on hand?
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 11:26 AM
FWIW, I tried ethernet for migrating from one iMac to another and it was a total failure (I didn't spend time trying to figure out why). When I switched to firewire (via a 400 - 800 adapter), it went smoothly in about 45 minutes.
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 11:39 AM

"Total failure" is spectacularly vague. Did the iMacs not see each other? Did Migration Assistant crash? Did the process seem to begin and then stall?

I probably wouldn't shudder at a trip to Manhattan, but it sounds like anything shorter than a one-week wait would be preferable to artie. laugh
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 12:06 PM
Migration Assistant didn't crash but the iMacs didn't see each other. Maybe I could have solved it by investing time in troubleshooting but it was faster and easier to use firewire.
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 05:16 PM

Were the two iMacs running Tiger and Lion, by any chance? Migration Assistant using Ethernet isn't supported in that case.

I guess my point was that if the objective is to migrate data, the set of all reasonable solutions does includes Ethernet, notwithstanding your individual experience. I wanted to make sure artie considered that possibility, since no one else mentioned it.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 06:02 PM
The G-Drive support tech to whom I spoke told me that I could daisy-chain an external FW-400 HD through the 800 out port on my G-Drive mini, but that they had never experimented with my scenario, which, he said, might require a power adapter (which I have not got).

Ball's in my court; I told the tech I'd call back and let them know (how their own product works).
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 06:27 PM
No, I had not considered the possibility of using an Ethernet cable; thanks for mentioning it.

I've never used an Ethernet cable other than between my DSL modem and deuced Mac(hina), and the terms Ethernet and data-transfer have, inexplicably, really, been mutually exclusive in my head. I've got at least one Ethernet cable in my box of extra phone technology and will try it if necessary. (It's an interesting Verizon cable with an RJ45 male at the modem end and RJ45 and USB males at the computer end...ingenious money-saver when you think about it.)

Ethernet throughput will be slower than with FW 400, but from what I've read it won't be excruciatingly slow and may be my answer.

I'm really hoping the daisy-chain trick will work!
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 07:19 PM
Originally Posted By: dkmarsh

Were the two iMacs running Tiger and Lion, by any chance? Migration Assistant using Ethernet isn't supported in that case.
Good question. The older one was running Tiger and the newer one Snow Leopard. Lion wasn't yet a gleam in Steve Job's eye (at least not publicly).
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 08:56 PM

Quote:
Ethernet throughput will be slower than with FW 400...

Really? Both Macs have gigabit ethernet, so theoretically the Ethernet throughput (1,000 megabits/sec, or 125 megabytes/sec) would be more than twice that of FW 400 (400 megabits/sec, or 50 megabytes/sec). Real-world variables would lower both of those rates, but I'm guessing Ethernet would more than hold its own.

The googleshpere is non-definitve. tongue
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/11/13 09:58 PM
> The googleshpere is non-definitve.

It is, but I just took a second look, and I suspect that I was taking something out of context when I said "slower," probably confusing FW 400 and 800 or 100Mb and Gb Ethernet.

Maybe I'll test GbE v FW 800 and 400 if I can (without buying an adapter just for the non-definitive experiment).
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/16/13 05:42 AM
Well, if it's a drive by drive thing, my G-Drive mini is one of those that works for the daisy-chain I had in mind, which, to refresh everybody's memory, was MacBook booted into FireWire target disk mode-->in FW 400 port of mini-->out FW 800 port of mini-->FW 800 port of MacBook Pro.

So G-Tecnology now has the answer to an InFAQ that I really think they should have had all along. (It's not like what I asked about was the most unlikely scenario in the world.)
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/16/13 07:06 AM
First, thanks for suggesting Ethernet, because if nothing else, it gave me my first experience with setting up an LAN (after reading many, many, many posts on the subject over the years), and although I had to sort through a wee bit of confusion, confusing to me, that is, it was no real big deal. smile

Now, throughput...

1. 12.24Gb of mp3s, both long (entire operas) and short, drag & drop via FW400 from G to MB: 25.5Mbps (8 min.)

2. Same, via FW800 from G to MBP: 40.8Mbps (5 min.)

3. 8.43Gb of operas (Don't ask!) drag & drop via Ethernet from MB to MBP: 1.76Mbps (80 min.)

4. Same, but with a different cable. (The first example was with an 8" Cat 5e cable I bought on-line, the second, with a 6' Verizon cable with no obvious specs.): 2.81Mbps (50 min.)

(Note that examples 3 & 4 are extrapolations based on 10% completed throughput.)

For examples 5 & 6, I worked on the assumption that rsync combined with other methodology would be fastest.

5. 151.52Gb of long and short mp3s and all sorts of other data cloned with CCC via Ethernet from MB to MBP: 11.50Mbps (3:39:31)

6. Same, but cloned with CCC via FW800 from MBP to G: 34.9Mbps (1:12:20)

So, unless someone can think of something very wrong that I might have done with Ethernet, my original impression that Ethernet would be slower than FW400 was apparently very correct. confused

Having been in alien territory, and not particularly anxious to spend the rest of my life there, I stopped with those stats in-hand, but if there's anything anybody thinks I can try that might shed some light on my results I'll be happy to keep trying.

Edit: Is it odd that the huge FW 800 clone ran slower than the FW 800 drag & drop?
Posted By: tacit Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/16/13 08:08 AM
It's not odd that a FW800 clone was slower. The cloning process reads and writes in small chunks, and (if you use default settings) also checks the version and date stamps of each file it clones to make sure it's not cloning an old file over a new one.
Posted By: artie505 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/16/13 08:26 AM
Thanks. (I should have realized at least some of that on my own.)
Posted By: Virtual1 Re: Daisy-chaining - 04/17/13 06:22 PM
I've seen internal storage chain for quite some time. I had a pmg4 awhile ago in fwtdm and plugged into my service machine, while tying to figure out where the heck that os install disc was. it wasn't in my service drive's optical tray. finally realized it was in the other mac.

I don't know if that extends to firewire ports or not. I would expect ALL attached storage to show up over target mode... thunderbolt, usb, ide, sata, esata, pcmcia, cardbus, flash drive, firewire, etc.
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