External Firewire Hard Drives - Daisy-Chaining

[dakara]

iMac 20" 2GHz PowerPC G5 250 GB hard drive.
OS X 10.4.11 1.5 GB memory

I have, at present, two External Hard Drives, 320 and 500 GB, both running on Firewire.
I am buying another Firewire 500 GB Drive, and since I have no more slots available, plan to "Daisy-Chain" the third drive through one of the others.
These are all powered drives from Macway [France].
I have experimented by Daisy-chaining the existing two drives, and the arrangement seems to work well, but I am not sure how it would work out on a long term basis.

Does anybody on the forum use this system, and if so, I would much appreciate any advice/input.

Best regards
Dakara

[markuswarren]

I've got three drives in firewire/usb enclosures and I've been running them daisy chained for a while now and I've not had any problems. The only annoyance is that if I want to access the last drive in the chain then I do have to power the other two drives, which means a fair few volumes on my desktop (I've got the two 320GB drives partitioned into several smaller volumes).

[dakara]

Thanks Markus,
I'll go ahead with more confidence now.

[Tenex]

My WD My Book Premiums have been daisy chained for about 18 months, they start and stop independently without issue and for good measure I have the firewire cable for my camcorder attached as well to the end. Go ahead, its so much easier on port usage no hubs etc required.

Unlike Markus the My Books power up independently as needed. As I never switch off my iMac they are always mounted but they are powered down until accessed.

[dakara]

Thanks Tenex,
When I experimented, using just the two H/Ds that I have now, I found that I needed the "Master" powered up before I could access the "Slave", but that I could unmount[?] each one individually, and that the one remaining mounted would still work. It certainly seems to be a great system for transferring files between H/Ds, and when the new one arrives, I will experiment further.
Is it better to "partition" the drive?
At the moment I just use Folders to separate different groupings.

Regards, Dakara

[Tenex]

Honestly under Windows I used to keep drives partitioned and ordered both for security and efficiency but I have to say that under OS X it really doesn't seem necessary or worthwhile. In over 18 months I haven't lost a file due to an OS problem and as a result I have the mounted drive icons on the desktop for ease of access. OS X seems to manage perfectly well its folder structure.

They are mounted but the drives are powered down so if I or the OS access either then only that drive spins up and then powers down after use. I really don't see any point in unmounting a drive. Other than looking for a NAS drive I really wouldn't buy anything but a firewire one as daisy chaining is so very convenient. My drives have no problem playing back video and simultaneously having a file written to them.

[dakara]

I am probably using incorrect terminology regarding "mounted/unmounted" but I take your point, and will follow your procedures.
Although I have had computers [Macs only] for seven years, I am afraid that they still remain pretty mysterious things to me.
Thanks again.

[Tenex]

It can be confusing, good luck.

[roaster]

There is no need to have intermediate drives in the chain mounted. It's just that the interface needs to be powered. You can un-mount any intermediate drives if you want. They will normally spin down.

Each firewire interface regenerates the digital signal for the next hop. There should be no problem just adding firewire devices wherever there's a free firewire socket.