iMac Mixed FW 800/400 problems

wabbitguy · Post by **wabbitguy** » Sun Jan 24, 2010 6:24 pm

Just wondering if it's the iMac or if it's the nature of firewire... My iMac has a 400 and 800 plug on the back. I took my Apogee Ensemble and Echo AudioFire 8 and plugged those into the 400 plug.

I took a LaCie 2Big Quadra and plugged that into the 800 jack. Reasoning was that the 800 would be faster since all my DP projects are on that drive.

Ran Digital Performer 7.1 and all I got was "CPU" overload messages. Playback would barely work at all. Changed everything from buffer sizes to work priority and nothing would make it work properly.

Quit DP, unmounted the LaCie drive, put on an 800 to 400 FW adapter, powered up the iMac again, set the host to 3, buffer to 2048, priority to high. Works perfect.

I know the iMac (and many of the other Macs) only have one internal FW buss, so my guess there is a conflict between the two speeds with different devices. Anyone ran across this on an iMac or do I have the only anomaly..

Mel