Slightly OT: Firewire drives - daisy chain or hub?

[Tony Nelson]

At 2:26 PM +0100 8/1/05, D. D. Brierton wrote:
>This is perhaps a little off-topic, but maybe not too much so as the
>answer might depend on how Linux and FC3 handle Firewire. I need to copy
>large (~80GB) amounts of data from one external Firewire/IEEE-1394 hard
>disk drive to another. My machine only has one Firewire port. One of the
>drives has a Firewire port on the back, so it is possible to daisy chain
>the disks together. Alternatively I could go out and buy a fairly
>inexpensive powered Firewire hub and connect the two drives to that.
>
>Are there pros and cons to these two methods that I should be aware of?
>Is one preferable to the other?

Both should work, and should produce the same performance.  All your
Firewire devices are on the same bus so they will see all the data in
either case, and there's only one interface on the computer, so the drives
will have to take turns transferring data.

The main advantage to using a powered hub (from my perspective having done
some Firewire development (on MacOS)) is that when somthing bad happens and
Firewire destroys the Firewire Interface you're hot-plugging something
into, it will be either the device or the hub that is destroyed, not the
computer's motherboard.
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