Topic: daisychain hds?

[c.b.taper]

i know next tonothing when it comes to computers. my cavaet... can i take one external 300 gb hard drive and through a firewire or usb cable connect them? second drive also 300 gigs but it says maxtor shared storage drive on it. whats that mean? and can i use it for personal storage? what are shared storage drives usually used for?

[dnsacks]

ususally, you can't simply connect drives together and transfer data directly between 'em.  You should, however, have no problem connecting both to your computer via usb/firewire.  Once this is done, assuming you're running win2k or winxp (or a mac os), the drives should automatically be recognized by the computer and should be accessible like any other drive -- you can then copy/cut/past files/directories just as you would with any other drive.

[TNJazz]

You can absolutely daisychain drives using firewire and transfer files between them.  That's why external firewire cases typically have 2 firewire ports on them.

So you could plug each drive into the next, and the last one you could plug into your firewire card.  No need to do this unless you have other peripherals on your firewire card though.  Firewire cards typically have 3 connectors, so unless you need to daisychain I would avoid it (if your lead drive loses connectivity and it does happen, then all your other drives will disconnect as well).  I would plug each drive separately into the card, unless you're using everything already.

Dirk