Firewire Interfaces And External Drives, Single-port FW device connection Options

[GitGeezer]

I'm looking for suggestions and experience with this connection problem...

Having recently purchased an M-Audio Ozonic Firewire keyboard, I find myself without an available Firewire port to connect my external drive. This drive, the only LaCie portable drive running at 7200RPM, has one Firewire and one USB2 port, NOT two Firewire ports. This prevents daisy-chaining the portable drive and the interface.

My questions are:

How do you use Firewire external drives (in order to avoid recording on the slow internal drive) with Firewire interfaces when there is just one Firewire port on each device?

Is it ever OK to daisy-chain Firewire audio interfaces with Firewire drives?

Do Firewire hubs work in this scenario, and if so, must they be externally powered (not powered by the Firewire bus)?

My system:

G4 Powerbook 667 (Titanium)
1 GIG memory
OS X 3.7

LaCie Mobile Hard Drive, 60GB 7200RPM, one Firewire 400 port & one USB 2 port

M-Audio Ozonic Firewire Keyboard/Audio/MIDI interface, one 6-pin Firewire port

Any help or case histories would be very much appreciated. I picked up the hardware yesterday expecting to work last night when it dawned on me how port-deprived I was.

Thank you.
GitGeezer

[jaffi]

I personally use a FW 800 for HD and a FW 400 for AI. But, you can use the daisychain method for recording. There is ample bandwidth in FW. You would be hardpressed to reach it's limits when working with audio under 24 tracks (similtaneously). In most apps, FW protocol lets the OS detect seperate devices even when they are on the same bus. So, you can effectively daisychain devices and have different info go to each device. In this case, audio in through the AI and 1s and 0s out to the HD. They are both recognized as seperate entities. Just keep in mind that each OS handles priorities differently. So, each implimentation will have slightly different results depending on the OS.