Another Lesson from Sesame Street: USB/FIreWire External Can Work Together

I have three OWC miniStack V2 external hard drives hooked up to my first generation Mac Mini. Two 500 GB are RAIDed together for 1GB of storage, and the other drive (750 GB) is the user accounts home directory folder. I have them daisy-chained together, and trust me, the back of the system is a cable jungle (see above image).

I am reasonably happy with the performance results. My review of the OWC miniStacks will have to wait for another day: in short, they're not perfect, but I did buy three so they can't be that bad. The RAIDed FW drives act as my Time Machine backup, and the 750GB drive fills up quickly with saved video, audio, and graphic projects.

This brief tip may be a obvious to many out there, but it took me far too long to figure it out, so I'll share on the off-chance it's useful to anyone else.

The NewerTechnology miniStacks have three additional USB ports on them, and therefore, should have been able to act as USB hubs for my extensive peripheral collection (EyeTV Hybrid, Fujitsu scanner, Canon digital camera, iPod dock, etc.). However, I could never get them to work as a hub. I believed this was because I was using them in FireWire mode and it was an either/or situation.

In the interests of science, it suddenly dawned on me - inspired by frustration - to just connect a USB cable ("Type A", the slim rectangular end to "Type B", the squarish connection type (usually on printers)) from the mini to the FW drive. Lo and behold, the USB ports on the external drive became active.

So, go figure, to make your USB ports active, you have to connect them to the USB port on the computer. The neat part is that you can have the USB ports active, but the drive still functions in FireWire mode with the FireWire cables connected, at FireWire speeds. Very cool - and for everyone but me it seems - very obvious.

D'oh.

As a related aside, I've used an eSATA drive and discovered how wonderfully fast they are. My experience is that your real-world speeds, in order of slowest to fastest are: USB, FW 400, FW 800, and eSATA. I have been considering how I could move to eSATA on my external drives, and then came across this CNET News article about the next iteration of FireWIre called "S3200" which should quadruple the speed of FireWIre next year. The neat thing about it is that while it may not be as fast as the up-coming USB 3, FW S3200 promises to be backwards compatible, and still provide bus power. So, for educators considering outfitting they're lab with the future in mind, FireWire may still be the horse to back.