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I currently have a firewire 800 desktop hard, and want to move the contents onto a another drive. If the other drive I get also has firewire 800, I know I can daisy chain them together.

I was wondering, because firewire runs as peer-to-peer, and I read the devices are able to do low level memory access themselves. I was also wondering if they would be able to transfer directly from one drive to the other without involving the CPU? Is there a way to do this?

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The CPU will definitely be involved in handling the transfer as the drive controllers use it. That you are using Firewire is only the conduit to transfer the data.

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P.S. The reason SCSI/SAS perform better, and are used in servers, is the controller card has its own processor to off-load most of the processing duties from the main CPU. – KCotreau Jul 11 '11 at 14:08
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It is theoretically possible, but you'd have to have a Firewire drive enclosure that would clone another drive. To do that, it would have to have its own CPU (or similar, even if very low-powered) and a special firmware that could do so. (It'd probably need a "copy" button on the outside, too.) I don't think any of these exist, though I'd love to see one.

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