Daisy Chain external hard drive

[NuJoizey]

i have 2 external seagate hard drives, and I have read that you can "daisy chain" them together. I believe I also read that you can only do this if you are using ieee 1394/firewire, which i don't have. So I think that pretty much means I can't daisy chain, but I wanted to post here to make sure from those of you in the know.

also, could someone tell me what the benefit of daisy chaining is, and how your OS recognizes it - I'm using WinXP OS - does your o/s recognize it as one big volume? - i.e. if you daisy chain a 160gb and a 300gb drive, does your OS see 480? or are they still 2 different partitions - and thus do you copy data back and forth between them? if so, then how is this different from just plugging in the two separate external hds into two separate USB or firewire ports and using them that way?

i know, i know, a lot of questions, but i'd be grateful for some discussion thanks!

 

[LWComputingMVP]

What are you trying to accomplish by "daisy chaining" the hard drives? Are you trying to create a single large partition? Are you just wanting to use one port to connect both drives to the PC? What?

 

[NuJoizey]

exactly. what "is" the purpose of daisy chaining these drives? I know it can be done, but why? OK, hypothetically, let's say I'm trying to create a single large partition. can you in fact do both of what you answered with these kind of drives?

 

[LWComputingMVP]

I'll start by saying creating one logical drive from both is a dangerous thing and NOT advisable. IF it can be done (I don't know; I've never tried with external drives because it is such a bad idea), then you would lose the data on BOTH drives if either one failed. When people combine drives like this it's usually to improve performance - but even firewire is not as fast as ATA/SATA/SCSI drives and thus if you were looking for a performance increase, that's not how you'd do it.

NON-USB drives (internal SCSI/SATA/ATA) can be combined like this, but it's still a bad idea and just because you can doesn't mean you should.

As for connecting one drive to the other, that might be possible. Some USB devices include "pass-through" ports that act as mini hubs. IF you device has one, then you can do it... if not, you can't.