Digital Home Thoughts: A Firewire Trick You Might Not Know...

If you're more familiar with USB than Firewire, here's something you might not know: many Firewire peripherals, specifically external hard drives, usually have two Firewire ports. This is because Firewire devices were designed to be daisy-chained together. Most PC owners haven't experienced this approach unless they remember the SCSI days. It's a clever idea, because it means you can connect an almost endless series of devices together, all without having to run back to the home source (such as a hub). Now here's the cool part: you can have multiple computers share the same hardware over Firewire by connecting both PCs to the same hardware.



Here's what I do: I have my LiteOn 8x DVD burner in an external ADS Tech Firewire drive enclosure. On the back it has two Firewire ports. One port is connected to my main desktop computer, and the other is connected to a Firewire cable that I've attached to the back of my desk using Velcro. When I need to burn DVDs with my laptop, I just plug in the Firewire cable and voilà! Instant access to my burner. Both computers can recognize and control the DVD burner without conflict (you obviously can't burn data from both computers at the same time though). This allows me the flexibility of having a DVD burner that any Firewire-equipped computer can access, without the restriction of having to put the DVD burner inside one computer.