Firewire Hub Vs. Daisy Chain

January 11, 2010 6:23 AM

Is there a speed difference between daisy-chaining firewire 800 devices, and hooking them up to a hub?

I have three Firewire 800 drives which are currently daisy chained. Would I see a performance benefit to adding a hub, and connecting the devices to the hub?

Curious if anyone knows before I spend the money on a hub.

posted by bump to computers & internet (4 answers total)

There should not be any performance increase from using a hub, assuming your 3 drives implemented their firewire correctly. The only reason I've found not to chain them together is if the cable to the first drive gets knocked out of the socket, all three drives go down. But getting a hub just moves the point of failure to the connection between the hub and the PC.
posted by nomisxid at 9:21 AM on January 11, 2010

I don't know about speed, but performance (if generalized enough)... yes.

When I had a number of firewire (400) devices daisy-chained, I'd occasionally need to use one of the devices elsewhere (physically), and would need to remove it from the chain. This rendered all the the devices after it on the chain unusable for just a little while, during plug switching. Occasionally, this was a problem if someone was using/transferring data on one of these drives, or was using an application that didn't like a change in drive availability while it was open. In this case, a hub increased my performance.

Also, as a chain increases in length, your points of failure (which can cascade) increases. It stays relatively flat with a hub, though you have just introduced an all or nothing failure point (which really isn't much different than pretending the power supply or boards of the first device in a chain will never fail).
posted by terpia at 10:24 AM on January 11, 2010

FireWire hubs are under $50, so, a bit pricier than additional FireWire cards. (Huh. I'd been told hubs were well over $100.)
posted by Pronoiac at 2:52 AM on January 13, 2010

(The price I mentioned is likely for Firewire 400 hubs, if anyone's wondering.)
posted by Pronoiac at 1:43 PM on January 13, 2010