Acill wrote:
SCSI has them, but not USB or Firewire. The interfaces dont work with
that way unless you connect them through a hub internaly, but it could
be done. Make one and market it to a bid time vender so you can be
rich!!
I think there may be a grand total of *one* Firewire to SCSI adapter on the market that actually supports a full 7-device chain, rather than 'point-to-point' bridging.
In turn, I found that one on eBay long ago, and it was actually a pre-certification part* (prototype, or Taiwan-only hardware?) from a no-name vendor.
YMMV. I think there are some multi-device USB/Firewire enclosures around, but they're rather rare and expensive, and probably 90% of them are using one bridge per device (with Firewire enclosures stringing things together with a simple Firewire chain internally, and USB generally just not showing up past one or two devices).
Software support for anything that actually does bridge a full chain is probably going to be rare, since that would demand the Firewire peripheral act like a full host-adapter, and require the driver support of one... single device bridges can 'cheat,' counting on the backing bus to handle a lot of the complexity for them, and just passing device commands and data back and forth without having to be very 'smart' (and thus proprietary**) themselves.
*Well, a FCC ID was present, but rather odd, in terms of referring to the manufacturer without being a product-specific string.
**Actually, I have no idea how 'proprietary' things like the Oxford 911 are in the grand scheme of things, but since they've become de-facto standards on par with the old ST-506 or IDE interfaces themselves, it's sort of a moot point. Everything that claims support for 'Firewire drives' supports them, while I expect any true HBAs are going to demand completely different software that nobody's known to write yet, considering they're practically unobtainium.
