OT-Daisy Chaining of drives

vidiot57 wrote on 8/11/2005, 2:19 PM
Hello all,

I am working in an edit suite(using vegas 6) and they have 4 external firewire drives.. They only connect and daisy chain 2 on to the system at a time..(long story, but they used to use Avid, and they were told only 2 at a time) Is there any reason why i cannot connect all 4 drives at a time?? All of the cables are short..(less than 6 feet)

Thanks in advance..
Mike Moncrief

Comments

riredale wrote on 8/11/2005, 3:01 PM
You can have as many as 63 daisy-chained firewire devices on a single port. There is also a maximum cable length of something like 60 meters.

I've run a daisy-chained external drive and camera on a single port; no issues. Of course, if you get into dozens of drives, troubleshooting will be a bit of a challenge.
Spot|DSE wrote on 8/11/2005, 3:11 PM
:-) Mike, I've currently got 21 drives chained. One thing I've learned though, is although they can come off the same card, as soon as you get 6-7 drives on one chain, you'll sometimes have probs, so I've got all 3 ports on one card feeding the various drives.
vidiot57 wrote on 8/11/2005, 3:31 PM
Hi,

Thanks for the responses so far.. I think there are two 6 in ports on the computer.. so i will probably split the drives up and go that way..

Thanks guys,
mike Moncrief

Steve Mann wrote on 8/11/2005, 4:05 PM
The problem comes when you want to do I/O on two or more devices in the chain at the same time. When two drives have to share the same resource, performance suffers.

Steve Mann
DGrob wrote on 8/11/2005, 4:11 PM
I've got a 400 GB internal that receives all my renderings. One firewire port serves the daisy-chain, the other holds my 4-pin camera cable for one of three cameras to capture.
One OS Drive
One Render Drive
One firewire external-drives port
One firewire capture port

Two ports, a lotta productivity. Darryl
vidiot57 wrote on 8/11/2005, 4:20 PM
I hear you DGrob, but this is a situation I have unfortuantley inherited..

Mike Moncrief

ken c wrote on 8/11/2005, 9:39 PM
21! wow. I thought my 8 was a lot... good insights re chaining drives, so far I haven't had any problems...

Agree re on same chain can cause problems, so I also have 3 internal drives.. I use an internal drive as a temp render drive, pulling footage captured onto external drives... and avoid using C for any temp file storage... that's a good tip.. eg use a 2nd internal drive as a temp storage drive for renders.. and draw stock/captured footage off the externals...

any other tips? great thread...

btw I use matrox 300 gig ext drives, any problems w/those from anyone?

ken
Grazie wrote on 8/11/2005, 10:15 PM
Internals:
4 drives - C System; D Graphics and Stock items; E DVD/CD etc . . F: Render, DVD prep, New Track, "Render To", 'Frameserving', etc ; G: Stock Audio and Audio creation

Externals:
Front patched MoBo f/w I/O serving 4 x externals total 1/3 terabyte AND rear Canopus 100 ACEDVio 6-pin I/O Panasonic Deck.

It just kinda works!

Grazie