Thanks for your reply.  I've tried both Siig and Belkin hubs and I've tried them both bus and self-powered.  No luck on either one.  I also tried running the FF800 alone directly from my MacBook's Firewire 800 port figuring I could use the 400 port for my other drives.  With just the FF800 connected it worked fine but as soon as I connected anything to the 400 port The 800 port didn't work at all (interesting because I have no problems when I use combinations of other firewire 400/800 devices simultaneously.

The only way I've been able to get the use of an external FW hard drive is to use one with two ports and put it in the chain between the Mac and the FF800.  This of course limits me to 1 external FW drive.

If you know of ANY hubs that will work with the FF800 I'd be happy to go out and buy one!

I did get a direct reply from Jeff Petersen at RME (Synthax).  He indicated that because of bandwidth issues the FF800 "sometimes" doesn't play well with other drives on a hub.  He suggested cutting down on the bandwidth in the settings app for the FF800.  I've tried that and it didn't help.  He suggested trying the FF800 alone on the hub.  It didn't work (I tried both bus and self-powered modes).  I use a MacBook Pro and have attempted to run the FF800 off the Firewire 800 port while running firewire 400 drives off the other port.  Not sure whether it was the Mac or the 800 but when I tried to use both the Firewire 800 port didn't work.

I have none of these problems with my Fireface400.

At this point I've pretty much concluded that there isn't any way to use the FF800 on a hub.  I don't think I've ever encountered with with Firewire.  It seems that the best you can do is to connect a firewire drive with 2 ports in the middle of the chain and put the FF800 at the end (I haven't tried chaining multiple drives)  The other alternative is to do what I've done and that's to start using USB2 drives on a USB hub and leave the FF800 alone on its own bus.

If anyone has discovered a model/make of firewire hub that does work or a workaround I'd sure be happy to hear about it.

the PCMCIA card isn't an option with the new MacBooks.  They've eliminated the card slot.  I'm wondering if anyone's tried putting the FF800 on a Firewire 800 hub (they're finally starting to show up on the market.)  with an 800 hub I assume the bandwidth issue wouldn't be a problem. 

Assuming that putting a Firewire 400 device on the hub (you can do this with an adapter) wouldn't affect the speed of the rest of the devices on the hub this might be a solution... although I'd like to get a sense of whether it'd work before I go out and spend $100 on one of these hubs.

RME... Care to comment?

Are there others interested in this or am I just blabbering alone in the wilderness?