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Hello brothers of sound, first of all, excuse my poor english.

I have been asked to do field-recording for a university film project in two weeks. The thing is I'd like to daisy-chain my firewire interface to a firewire external hdd. When using my interface DC powered or bus-powered (firewire) there's no problem at all, the same goes to my External HDD. But when I daisy chain: MOTU -> HDD -> Laptop or HDD -> MOTU -> Laptop, either devices seems to be not available to OSX which is a huge problem for me as I have little space on my internal HDD.

My equipment is:
MOTU Ultralite (2006)
Apple Macbook Pro (2008)
Macally Firewire External HDD (2008)

Any insight on how to solve this, please let me know.

Thanks in advance,

Pablo Rubio

Comments

myuhlz Tue, 06/03/2008 - 17:56

As you can imagine, with the gear I intend to do the recording there's not much portability (Laptop 15.4" + Interface, etc...) The recording itself (to the purist) could hardly be described as field-recording as I won't be following anybody with a boompole, field-mixer, etc. Instead, the shots will be stationary and I'll have my setup on a table, connected to a battery system. That's pretty much how things are going to be.

Pablo R.

Space Tue, 06/03/2008 - 18:31

"FireWire cable power is present anytime the AC adaptor is powering the system, including shutdown. The MacBook's six-pin FireWire connector provides unregulated 9 V to 12 V power with a maximum load of 0.75 A.

Output voltage depends on the system's battery charge level. Output voltage may be lower when the battery is not fully charged. "

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/HardwareDrivers/Conceptual/

Maybe this is the issue?

myuhlz Sat, 06/07/2008 - 06:10

Thanks for your time Space. Hmm, yeah the FW port at the macbook is on unless the system is in sleep or shutdown. But, thats not the problem. My problem is that the motu should stop receiving power from the FW port, from the moment I connect the power supply to it. At least that's what the manual says, that the motu will follow the higher voltage as a power source.

P. Rubio

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