Daisy Chaining Drives
 

Hello,

Any problem with Daisy Chaining 4 External Firewire drives together ??
Using 6 foot cables (or less) to connect them..

I am working at a Place, where they have 4 external drives.. and somehow they were told they could only use 2 at one time.. Which I do believe is true..

Thanks,
Mike Moncrief

In theory, Daisy Chaining is possible, up to a point. Much of the limitations depends on each NLE system however. Your mileage may vary. Some can handle more than others.

Hi,

Thanks for your response.. We are using vegas 6..Maybe this thread should be moved there???
Anyway i caan uderstand if you were using many drives with lots of cables, that you would stretch the limits of this technolgy..
But Is 4 drives stretching this limit??

Mike Moncrief

Not familiar with Vegas (Avid myself). But Generally what happens is, at some point, you start to DROP frames, and have long seek times. So you may not know you've got a problem straight away. IF you have four drives loaded up with media, daisy chain them and do a quick edit. See how it responds. IF you have four empty drives, and want to start capturing and editing... well ask the VEGAS folks what their experiences are. When you plug them in, does it show up as ONE huge drive, or Four Seperate drives?

Hello,

They will show up as four separate drives.each having its own drive letter..
I could see if you were trying to access all fours drives at tha same time that it would drop frames.. But the media for each project is usually kept on one drive..
The folks who own this sytem came from the avid world.. and that is why they are not daisy cahaining more thn two.. they were told by Avid not to..

Anyway i am not near the system right now to try all four.. It will be tommorow.. Any others out there have experience with this??

Mike Moncrief

Mike, you say the media for each project is kept on one drive... what's the value of daisy chaining? I mean What happens if the media is scattered over more than one drive, can Vegas handle it through single firewire stream?

Hello,

the value is, i can load up a project, maybe edit it, sweeten audio etc.. and then save it.. and then I can load up another project from another drive, without messing wilth power up, cabling etc..Also i can copy things from one drive to anothere easily.. Its just convinence..

Mike

I have 3 external firewire drives connected by daisy chain and no problems with them. 1 maxtor, 1 western digital and one of my older 120gig drives in a HD enclosure.

I keep all of my short animations and project files on two of them and the 3rd one I use in case I have to move a project so I can work another.

My computer has 2 250gig drives for dedicated for video but some of the projects that I work on fill these up fast.

Maybe you could try Firewire 800.