I currently have a Focusrite saffire pro 24 interface which is a fw400 device, as my macbook has only one firewire port everything (projects/audio etc) is running from the internal drive. I have a fw800 drive that i hope to use for my Logic projects and will soon be purchasing a second to run my audio from. I was hoping firstly for a recommendation of a good firewire hub to run all 3 devices from and secondly some confirmation whether or not having devices of different speeds connected to the hub would affect the performance of the afformentioned devices and how to avoid that, if possible. Thanks in advance, Pete

Hi Pete, Have you tried daisy-chaining your firewire devices? For example, connect your macbook to your FW800 Ext, drive and then connect it to your Focusrite Pro 24. Of course, you need to make sure your FW800 drive has a FW400 port so you can connect the audio interface to it. Also, good to check that the Focusrite supports daisy-chaining. I haven't seen one in action for a while... You can definitely daisy chain two hard drives though... so you could get a FW800 hub (which plugs in to the mains) and connect 2 daisy-chained drives to it and the interface to a separate port. Out of interest, why are you going to run audio from one drive and your projects from another? By 'audio' do you mean samples or sample libraries? Thanks R

Thanks for the reply, i have considered daisy chaining before but have read lots of conflicting posts on various forums that have just left me confused basically. Regarding your other question about using 2 drives, yes i would be using one of them for samples (drums mostly), i was just going from Ski's recommendation in another thread about having separate drives for projects and audio. My setup isn't the most demanding, all the audio i use is mostly drums and bounced audio that i resample/reprocess etc. The rest is virtual instruments and effects, i mostly use all Native instruments software so i probably dont need the latest and greatest setup but i have been getting a lot of system overload messages recently. cheers, Pete

One more question, when you mention using the hub, would the speed of the interface affect the speed of the drives? meaning would they run at the slower rate or would each run at their optimum speed? cheers, Pete

When you daisy chain, say, two FW800 drives on a FW800 bus, the speed of the FW bus doesn't get reduced. The speed of the FW bus remains constant. Say you have two FW800 drives in a daisy chain: a project drive (with audio streaming) and a sample drive (sample streaming). The variable here is how much data is being read off of the drives at any given time, not the speed of the bus. And the amount of data being read off of either drive at any given moment will not likely be equal or balanced. You can connect up to (I believe) 127 FW800 drives in a daisy chain and you won't impact on the speed of the bus itself. Now... any hard drive (FW, eSATA, USB) has a limit to how much data they can deliver at any given moment. But let's say you had this really intense production where you were streaming the maximum amount of data possible off of those two FW800 hard drives. Would the combined amount of data from both drives bring the FW bus to its knees? That's one question I can't answer, but my experience tells me that it's possible to daisy chain multiple drives and play back an intense amount of data (movie scoring, requiring audio, video, and samples) and not encounter "disk too slow" error messages. I think that would be an interesting question to investigate, tho. Meanwhile, the main point I'm trying to make is that connecting multiple drives of like speed on the same-speed bus doesn't not reduce the speed of the bus. Now, daisy chaining FW devices of mixed speeds is another matter. FW400 and FW800 devices connected on a FW800 bus need to be configured in a particular way in order for the FW800 device to communicate at its full speed. That's a subject for another post which, if I have time, I'll write later this evening.

Here's some really great information on connecting FW devices. If you study this carefully it will explain a lot. : - ) [img]http://www.logicprohelp.com/files/firewire_276.png[/img]

"A hub wont speed up your FW bus, but will allow all devices connected to it to run at their maximum speed" As focusrite don't support daisy chaining, this is exactly the info i needed. Thank you very much for your time and input, now i'm off to buy a decent hub. cheers, Pete