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What is your drive set up with only one FW 800 port? On my G5 any FW port used in a daisy chain out the 828 wasn't a happy one. I have audio on one drive and sample libraries on the other. Any suggestions on order?

It almost doesn't matter with firewire because all ports (400 and 800) fold into a single buss. The buss speeds for G5 firewire topped out at 33Mhz. The option was to get a PCI-x firewire card with multiple firewire ports. PCI-x buss speeds vary depending on which slot is in use. There is one slot running at 133Mhz while the others run at 100Mhz. Which slot is the 133Mhz escapes me at the moment. Still, it's 3-4 times that of the built-in fw buss.

Performance on the built-in fw buss depends largely on how much data you're streaming and what type of data is in use. VIs seem to fare much better when run from SATA drives (internal or external), but I've never had any appreciable problems with recording audio on large projects (30+ audio tracks) from a single firewire 400-- except where the drive itself might have been faulty.

How does the performance diminish with daisy chaining two or more drives? Different users are likely to have different valid experiences to report. Much of it is project/product/user-specific.

I wouldn't be a risky bet at all to first suspect that any problems with streaming from fw 400 or 800 would be due to the instrument libraries. Beyond that, much could be said for how many different instruments are being streamed from a single drive.

If you're experiencing drop-outs, I would disable all the instruments and then add them back one at a time just to see where the "threshold of pain" is for the fw buss. Pianos can be hungry instruments where data is concerned. Some drum VIs and certain orchestra libraries can also be very demanding. These can easily overwhelm the drive and the buss.

With a G5, I would consider moving instrument libraries to the internal drives and using the external fw drives for recording audio.

I dropped a SATA PCIe card in my G5 and have been running four happy external SATA drives for all audio and VI's (plus the two internals for system and programs) for years. Time Machine backup is to a rotated pair of external USB2 drives.

Two things sit on my Firewire bus: 828mkII and an external CD burner on my desk that is usually not powered up. Solid.

SATA cards are cheap now, if you can find one that is compatible with your PPC. I recall paying like $250 for my Hi Point card when I bought it doubt 6 years ago. Cutting edge at the time.

Sorry for the confusion. I am getting ready to buy an 2011 iMac and wanted to head off any problems. Thunderbolt is on the verge but everyone else will most likely be verge less. Thanks for the info.

Well, if a late model iMac is at issue, then the firewire buss will be less of a concern. Where the previous standard was 33Mhz, today's firewire busses are blazing along at 2.6 GIGAhertz!! An fw interface and a pair of fw drives should be no problem.

Still, I would consider splitting out the heavy-hitting VIs into separate drives. All that said, there are always limits. The benefit of the towers was in their expandability where a diversity of data busses were made possible. That wasn't always the case with the iMac.

I would consider Thunderbolt sooner than later. Where SATA/eSATA offers 3GB per second of data transfer, Thunderbolt offers 10GB per second. You would need to get a Thunderbolt box plus a firewire adapter that snaps into the Thunderbolt box.

Check out the pic. On the left side, you'll see the little T-bolt box with the fw card poised in front of it.

TBolt will handle your drives, just a tad costly at present.

HCMarkus wrote:TBolt will handle your drives, just a tad costly at present.

Not sure what "costly" is these days where Thunderbolt goes, but a Sonnet Echo 34 TB hub-box is running abut $130. The express card for fw is coming in around $100. I paid gobs more for my PCIe/PCIx cards to the same (but slower) effect.

For $250 or less, that's an awful lot of oochie.

I have Trilian on one drive, Ivory, MOTU mach 5 and east west Plat on another and everything else is on my main drive. Thanks or the info.

I did the deed and ordered a 2.7 quad i5 iMac 2011 refurbished. I had to order SL 10.6 discs as this one comes with Lion. I was told by the rep at Apple that since this was a May 2011 the chips were still designed to be compatible with SL 10.6. After July 2011 the chips were designed to be compatible with Lion in mind and not backward compatible with SL without a huge hit in performance. As soon as I get it I will max out the RAM at 16gb. Just ordered DP7 and am eligible for 8 when it comes out according to Customer Service at MOTU. I am no longer a disenfranchised child of Apple. So good to back in their arms again. Thuderbolt Hub box is looming.

Frodo wrote:

HCMarkus wrote:TBolt will handle your drives, just a tad costly at present.

Not sure what "costly" is these days where Thunderbolt goes, but a Sonnet Echo 34 TB hub-box is running abut $130. The express card for fw is coming in around $100. I paid gobs more for my PCIe/PCIx cards to the same (but slower) effect.

For $250 or less, that's an awful lot of oochie.

Don't forget the $50 cables... but yes, a lot of power is now available to iMac, Mini, and laptop owners.

HCMarkus wrote: Don't forget the $50 cables... but yes, a lot of power is now available to iMac, Mini, and laptop owners.

Yeah. Oochie has its price, doesn't it?

But, I think that with the hub and the card, the rest will be about just using FW cables.