I'm backing up some DVD to eventually convert and use on an iPhone or iPod and I'm having terribly slow transfer of files using firewire to an external HDD.

Is it the case that firewire doesn't like doing a double transfer?

The DVD burner is external firewire also. If I rip direct to my HDD rather than my external drive the process only takes 20 mins rather than several hours (uncounted - went away came back and it still hadn't finished so I aborted).

ALSO is it normal for it to take a LONG TIME for Toast to convert Video_TS files to mpeg4?
I think the file was around 2GB compressed down to 810mb and took over an hour - again not sure how long I went out for a few hours.

Way to bump a dead thread.

Why start a new one when this one is similar?

I have definately determined that having 2 firewire devices plugged in at the same times screws everything up - even if the 2nd device is not being used.
Is there any way around this?

What mac are you using, and are you daisy chaining.

1.6GHz iMac G5 with 1gb RAM. Always plug my devices straight into the ports on back of computer. I have 2 ext HDD, so if I'm transferring data from one to the other it's a little slower than from the internal HDD. But if I'm trying to use the external burner to save to or read from the external HDD it just bogs right down.

Would daisy chaining improve things? I hadn't consdered doing that.

I think the problem is that despite having several firewire ports, they all run through a single controller chip. This chip can sustain a data transfer of 400Mbps. The ports can therefore sustain the 400Mbps (or 50Mb, whatever the real world number is) as long as only a single port is being used. So two devices using the bandwidth would therefore be limited to half of the total speed if being used simultaneously.

USB operates the same way I'm pretty sure, and the more devices being used simultaneously the slower the fastest connected device will go. Someone correct me here if I'm wrong?

Arkhum is on the money. And it is the burner's continual "hang on a minute, my buffer is full" messages which is what is crippling the whole FireWire bus. The burner mechanism signals "not ready, buffering" to the box's FireWire chip, which tells the controller in your Mac "no traffic please, device busy".

If you want the external burner to run as best as it is capable without impacting on system-wide performance, copy the material from the external HD to the internal HD first. Daisy-chaining the drives won't make a jot of difference to your situation, konni, but adding an intelligent FireWire hub to the mix will improve matters noticably ... but with the burner in the mix, the gains would be negligible, and smart FW hubs are not cheap.

thank you Arkhum and Brains. I like that kind of answer - it explains a lot.

I have used an external FW HDD and external FW DVD-RW drive daisy chained with no troubles (both bus-powered).

Config was: 12 inch PowerBook ---- FW HDD ---- FW DVD-RW drive.

Have burned DVD-R with Toast for disc image located on FW HDD - no troubles.

BTW, I thought FW was 'smart' and would not necessarily have to send data via Mac (e.g. copy between the FW HDD and FW DVD-RWdrive).

'Smart' meaning 'unlike USB which uses master - slave connections, where all data has to go through master'.

The 1394 protocol is smart, Aladdin, but not everyone implements 1394 correctly. Devices with the more expensive Oxford chipsets in them can happily work around devices which are being busy; cheap boxes with Western Digital, Prolific or ALI chips cannot, because they rely on extra babysitting from the host.

Now I'm curious as to what brand of enclosures Konni is using for her external drive and burner

The aluminium enclosure of the burner I bought last week is a bit of a no-name, says ME-340 series. No brand shows on the picture on box, but the actual case has Welland printed on it.
The combo drive manual says LITE ON Firewire 1394 / USB2.

My ext. HDDs are a WD My Book 800 but going to 400 FW port on my iMac G5 and the other an Seagate (Initio) inside an Excraft enclosure.

OK new problem, same device, but probably NOW in the wrong thread (sorry currawong).
The Ext. DVD Burner works fine on the iMac G5 however plugged into a PPC-G4 running 10.3.9, the system profiler recognises the Firewire drive as CD-RW/DVD-RW but disc burning = not supported. Yeah, so it's not letting me burn. Is this an OS problem or something else?

I'm assuming the iMac G5 is running leopard?
It is an OSX problem patchburn can help

Thanks Gaehl. Just caught up with Brains in chat, with same solution so I'm now I'm installing and testing and...
it's working. Yay my G4 not so redundant now.

Just for completeness' sake (seeing I answered you on IRC):

The G4 is (now was) misssing PatchBurn.