RedStation RedMag 1.8" + (2) FireWire 800 Drives

[Alex Olinger]

Hi,

I was wondering if it is possible to daisy chain 2 bus powered external hard drives to the RedStation if all three devices over firewire would be properly powered through a current generation MacbookPro.

I`m asking this as my MPB only has one firewire 800 port and I`m trying to avoid having a bulky firewire hub on set. I know the RedStation can be daisy chained to provide power and transfer data from additional Redstation`s, but did not know if the same held true with external HDD`s.

Thanks

[Christopher Reig]

Hello there,

I have done this configuration once before, daisy chaining two 5400RPM LaCie Rugged drives to the RED Station 1.8" reader. All worked okay. I would avoid this if at all possible though, as your transfer speeds will plummet sharing those 800mbps bandwith among three.

Good luck,

Chris

[Alex Olinger]

How much of a transfer rate decline did you experience? And what sort of alternative system set up would you recommend

[Sam Edwards]

Does it have to be battery powered? The LaCie thunderbolt drive can be configured as raid 1. So your data would be safe with only one copy.
Cheers,
Sam

[Alex Olinger]

I`m looking at some eSata RAID 1 drives at the moment as a thunderbolt drive is a bit out of my hdd price range. What brand of drive would you recommend? I like the idea of using a RAID 1 drive for a bit of peace of mind until I can get the drive back home to run additional backups.

[joe hedge]

If your MBP is current generation you can use this setup

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresscard34thunderbolt.html
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_sata_express34.html

Which gives you 2 eSata ports for your drives, then you FW800 the Red Station

Works great, I have a 17" MBP w/Thunderbolt so I use the Thunderbolt adapter as the Red Station port, and plug the drives into another Express34 card in the MBP's Express34 slot

[Jonathan B.]

I just published results of my tests using that exact setup. I confirm, for me it turned out to two times faster to use Sonnet's gears over a chained Firewire setup.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?75149-DIT-Speed-test-results-eSATA-vs-Firewire800-on-Macbook-pro

[Alex Olinger]

Thanks for all of your help everyone. Decided to go with the Sonnet Tempo SATA 6Gb/s Expresscard/34 card as I managed to dig up an older MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard34 slot, it`s a shame they don`t make those on the current Macbook pro lines.

I`m going to run the RedStation into Firewire 800 port, and go through the new ESata port to a G - RAID Mini in a RAID 1 config. Not as fast as eSata to eSata, but will avoid the severe bottlenecking by daisy chaining through Firewire.

I had heard some were having issues getting the RedStation to be detected through the Sonnet ExpressCard34, but I`ll at least try it, otherwise will keep some spare FW800 cables with me.

Thanks again

[Shane Kelly]

I use the sonnet esata card with 2 esata ports. It's so much faster than fw800. Only problem is that my computer freezes when I eject the card. I power the computer down,replace the ssd and reboot. It's a small price to pay for faster Xfer times.

[Doug Beatty]

Has anyone successfully gotten a FW800 daisy chained to a bus powered Redmag USB 3.0? I tried the other day and it was no dice running from my Caldigit PCIx card (http://www.caldigit.com/avdrive/card_pciex.html).

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I use the sonnet esata card with 2 esata ports. It's so much faster than fw800. Only problem is that my computer freezes when I eject the card. I power the computer down,replace the ssd and reboot. It's a small price to pay for faster Xfer times.

That happens to me too. Though I think if you have everything connected BEFORE you power on the machine, it won't happen.