USB 2 through an external firewire device: Will this work?

Factual Questions
1

The setup: I have an eMac, about a year old. The USB ports are only USB 1. Since it’s an eMac, upgrading is pretty much out of the question. No problem, I’m quite happy with my Firewire ports, but it did bother me when I (stupidly) purchased an external hard drive with USB 2, and only when I got it home and started moving video clips did I realize that it is, well, REALLY slow. Put the drive to the side, waiting for a new machine (the drive was on a really good sale, otherwise I would have returned it).

Fast forward 6 months, and I’m sick of the 40+ gigs of home movies of dance competitions my wife loaded on the machine, and still hasn’t gotten around to editing (leaving me with a whole 1.02 GB free). I purchased an internal hard drive and a firewire/USB 2 enclosure. The enclosure came before the hard drive shipped, and I was all antsy to do something technical, so I ripped apart the old external drive to get the hard disk and threw it into the new enclosure.

Again, the new enclosure is both firewire and USB 2. I know that you can run another firewire device through the first device (right now, I have my iPod going through the external drive). My question is, if I had a USB 2 device, could I run that through the external drive, and have it show up as a removable device? If it would work, would it run at (close to) USB 2 speed, USB 1, or somewhere in between? (I would try this myself, but unfortunately, after ripping apart the old external drive, I am fresh out of USB 2 devices).

2

If I’ve understood your setup correctly, the answer is no.

Firewire allows peer-to-peer communication, and hence can be daisychained (as in your iPod-External HD-eMac setup). USB, however, is a “Host/Peripheral” (or “Host/Target”) protocol. Your eMac acts as a USB1 host, so you were able to connect your external HD (a USB2 peripheral) to it, and it worked fine albeit slowly.

The USB chip in your external Firewire/USB2 HD is a “Peripheral” or “Target” device, so must be connected to a host for it to work. You can’t just plug another USB device into it and expect the eMac to see anything via the Firewire interface (which I think is what you’re trying to do, although forgive me if I’m wrong).