Guy At Apple Store Told Me I Can Piggy Back Firewire Devices, The Audio Interface And The External Hardrive..., is this true ? Options

[etadaepar]

Yea i was going to buy the imac but they don't make one with 2 firewire ports one for my audio interface and the other for the audio drive so I don't have to record to my system drive, so i was asking about that and the guy says that's not an issue because firewire devices ckan be "piggy-backed" he said I can do it with the interface/soundcard and the external HD and record onto the hard drive from the audio interface still going through the apple software...?


thanks

This post has been edited by etadaepar: Wed 10 Jun 2009, 06:16

[makaala]

Beware. I have an M-audio firewire 410 interface and for the longest time had issues and had to re-install the driver multiple times... a real pain. Led me to buy an Edirol UA-101 USB (very satisfied). I use the Edirol with Logic 8 and occasionally use the firewire for m-powered pro-tools sessions.
Well... to make a long story short, there are issues using the M-audio FW410 a FW800 drive that is daisy chained with other firewire drives hooked up to it. In an M-audio forum, I stumbled across this incompatibility and problem set that has to do with FW800 drives. see below
Here is the text from the M-Audio support page... at least they are honest.

"Q: Why do I sometimes lose connection to my M-Audio FireWire interface or have audio drop outs when also using a FireWire 800 hard drive?

A: Computers that have both a FireWire 400 and a FireWire 800 port may be sharing the same FireWire bus internally. When using both, the 400 and the 800 port at the same time, you may experience problems like audio drop outs or loss of connection to the M-Audio FireWire interface. There's a variety of possible reasons for this including but not limited to bandwidth limitations, clocking issues (400/800) and bus master problems with the devices connected to both ports. M-Audio recommends using the M-Audio FireWire audio interface on the computers original FireWire port while adding a separate FireWire interface card (with a Texas Instruments chipset) to the system (PCI, PCIe, ExpressCard, or PCMCIA). Connect any third party FireWire 800 devices to the added FireWire interface card.

If your computer does not have expansion slots for a separate FireWire interface card there are 2 possible alternatives:

If your external hard drive has FW400 connectivity, you can daisy chain the hard drive to the 2nd FireWire port* (if available) on your M-Audio Device
If your external hard drive has USB 2.0 connectivity, you can connect the hard drive to a USB 2.0 port on the computer
* Excludes Ozonic, ProjectMix I/O, and ProFire Lightbridge."

The quality of sound from both interfaces is just fine with FW410 having a nicer feature with two headphone outs. Good luck.
Imac 2.66, Dual G5 2.0
Edirol UA-101, M-audio FW410
Logic 8, M-powered Pro-tools 7 +