External Drives

Hey my Imac just died so im forced to use my Peecee how many external drives can I have hooked up via firewire? is there a limit? besides the firewire limit of like 49 or whatever

 

Wouldn't it just be home many ports as to how many devices you can physically hook up?

 

I believe that 16 can be daisy-chained, but I don't know what that does to the transfer rate. If they're bus-powered, I wouldn't chain them at all--too much ac draw on the 1394 bus...My opinion, not proven...

USB 2.0 is faster (480 Mbps) than firewire (400)...Welcome to our world.

 

Isn't there something like Firewire 2? Runs at 800?

 

Actually, while the bit rate of USB is indeed faster than Firewire, the reality is that USB connected hard disks normally run around 20mbyte/sec transfer rates and Firewire connected hard disks will normally do around 30mbyte/sec transfer rates. The 800mbit version of Firewire, IEEE-1394B, is found on a few newer Firewire drives, but obviously your system has to also support the new standard.