Firewire Drive brings Mac to it's knees?

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Fri May 20, 2011 7:44 am

Just noticed a few days ago that my studio Mac started acting randomly sluggish.

I'd get the beach ball in DP and an attempt to save to my less than 6 months old external FW backup (Iomega® UltraMax Single Desktop Hard Drive 1 TB) would give me an error message. Even dragging a little .gif to it would be rejected as would trying to eject it from the desktop.

I shut down the computer, turned the drive off and replaced it's cable.
Rebooted and everything seemed fine, except Apple's Disk Utility said it needed repair which it did judging from the progress list.

Still noticing, on occasion, that I'm having some issues. I don't think it's a FireWire issue, but this drive in particular. It seems to want to power down (sleep?), and I have not checked that in any preferences. Nothing is supposed to power down, ever.

I'm presuming that I may have a bad drive...just curious why it seems to affect the entire system.

Thanks...

Buzzy

daniel.sneed · Post by **daniel.sneed** » Tue May 24, 2011 1:10 pm

Can't help much, just sharing.
My new 1To external drive brings many unexpected behaviors when connected thru FW: no boot, mac hangings, HD disappearings, app hangings, but all is fine when connected thru usb.
It's already been warranty serviced once, but will be twice... or more!

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Tue May 24, 2011 1:16 pm

I'm trying USB, now. Just had a freeze a few minutes ago, but it was so frozen that I could not open the iomega to see what it was showing and if might have been the culprit.

I was simply trying to trash an item from the desktop when it froze.

Backing up data VERY soon from this drive.

Buzzy

burn em · Post by **burn em** » Tue May 24, 2011 3:51 pm

Back it up now! That drive is probably on it's way out. Good luck

bayswater · Post by **bayswater** » Tue May 24, 2011 4:57 pm

Do you happen to have some sort of camera on the same FW bus? There can be bandwidth contention leading to file corruption on FW drives in that situation, even if the camera is inactive. The original iSight was a good example.

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Tue May 24, 2011 5:38 pm

No camera on this Xeon. However I will double check to make sure iSight is inactive. I believe that's an option.

Some quick research indicates that there are complaints about the power supply to these drives.

I have everything I want to back up in a folder. First thing in the morning.

Buzzy

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Tue May 24, 2011 6:05 pm

Have you tried popping the drive out of its enclosure and running it in your tower?

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Tue May 24, 2011 6:23 pm

mikehalloran wrote:Have you tried popping the drive out of its enclosure and running it in your tower?

I may have the terminology wrong but is it a slide and plug SATA drive like the 3 I have within the Mac?

(see sig)

Thanks...

Buzzy

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

mikehalloran · Post by **mikehalloran** » Wed May 25, 2011 7:47 am

buzzsmith wrote:
mikehalloran wrote:Have you tried popping the drive out of its enclosure and running it in your tower?
I may have the terminology wrong but is it a slide and plug SATA drive like the 3 I have within the Mac?

If a newer enclosure, it should have a 3.5" SATA drive inside. This will pop into one of your bays.

If the internal drive is PATA/IDE, then no.

At 1T, I would expect an SATA drive inside.

MOTUnation.com