MOTUnation.com

Hey.. long time (years) lurker. I've got lots of good information from you guys over the years. Got a little quandary here....

I want to add a UDA-2 (Firewire) to my rig however I think I'm out of ports. Here's what I've got:

Late 2013 iMac
MDP#1 to FW adapter to Backup Drive to 828Mkii to 828pre to Focusrite I8
MDP#2 to HDMI adapter for 2nd monitor

I'm also wondering if there is some alternate way I can connect my second monitor. USB to HDMI or DisplayPort?

What do you guys think? Am I missing something?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Although Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained, it requires an external monitor to be at the end of the chain. The Apple TB-FW adapter, likewise, must be at the end of the chain. Your iMac has only 2 TB ports.

My 2010 only supports one external monitor but I run two. You can run a monitor off a USB port using an adapter with a DisplayLink chip. There are many brands—look for the free DisplayLink driver in the product description. These work pretty well unless you are running High Sierra 10.13.4–6 as Apple disabled that functionality. 10.13.3 and earlier are fine and DisplayLink has announced that they will release a Mojave compatible driver as Apple has re-enabled that ability.
http://www.displaylink.com/downloads/macos

Your other choice is to abandon FireWire as Apple did in 2011. Actually, Intel never supported it but Thunderbolt supports some of the functionality which is why the adapter works in many instances.

Thank you for your reply. I don't think I am quite ready to abandon FW as I have three interfaces that rely on it and replacing them would be a little pricey.

I appreciate the DisplayLink driver link.

I've been doing some research and I think I'll be ok like this:

iMac TB to FW 800 adapter to UAD

The UAD has a FW 400 port which I can then use to connect the rest of my chain.

Everything I read seems to indicate this would be ok. You have any problems with that?