How many IEEE 1394 devices can be on the bus?
This is a FAQ that we have seen answered wrong on numerous sites. The maximum number of devices that can be on one channel (sometimes called a subnet) is 63. This figure includes the host computer, so if you are connecting devices to a IEEE 1394 equipped PC or FireWire equipped Macintosh, then you can connect 62 devices to it. This figure is not per port, unless each port has its own channel, which we currently do not have any data on such configurations. An illustration of this is an iMac with two FireWire ports, which can accommodate a total of 62 FireWire devices attached to it. Furthermore, the maximum number or devices that can be daisy chained (connected in a serial fashion) is 17 including a host computer. In other words, the maximum number of devices that can be daisy chained to a computer is 16. When more than 16 devices need connections, then the devices need to be connected in an hierarchical (sometimes called a tree) fashion. The easiest way to create a hierarchy is to use
