[FW] Trouble with Firewire on External Enclosure with serial ata

[jeff chasick]

the 10.3.0 fiasco was an Apple driver related issue and Oxford released 
a patch so everyones drives would work again - the 10.3.0 issue is 
totally unrelated to the 10.3.6 issue (except that they both are 
problems with the Apple driver.....)

the 10.3.6 problems were similar, but different because it affected the 
Oxford 922 chip, the Initio 2430 chip, and the Initio 1430 chip

hasn't anyone asked the question, "well everything worked fine in all 
of these versions of the OS until version 10.3.x was released and 
suddenly things that worked before stopped working......."

again, yes, there were some people that encountered problems with the 
911 chip back in Nov 2003 when 10.3 was released and every Oxford based 
device on the face of the planet stopped working correctly - that was 
fixed by Oxford in the v3.8 firmware release

under 10.3.6 there were some problem reports, but not everyone, and 
actually most users did not encounter problems (with the Oxford 911 
chip - there were problems with the Initio 1430 chip for which a patch 
was released by Initio)

10.3.7 seems to have quieted things down (thank you Apple for fixing 
the driver), and yes, there have been a couple of unrelated issues that 
a handful of people have reported to various Mac sites, but again, they 
are random, they are not wide spread, and not a problem - if there is a 
problem then Oxford and Initio will release updates if needed (until 
Apple releases the next version and fixes the drivers again.....)

On Jan 4, 2005, at 3:08 PM, Art McGee wrote:

> This is all wrong. Numerous people have reported problems
> with the Oxford 911 chipset going all the way back to the
> first Firewire bug that hit Mac OS 10.3.0. Even then, some
> claimed that the problem only affected the 922 bridge, in
> spite of the fact that owners of 911 enclosures and external
> drives were having the problem. I really don't care about
> what Oxford is able to reproduce in a lab, real world
> results have been something quite different.
>
> I suggest updating the firmware no matter what, instead of
> depending on the recent unreliability of Apple updates. This
> isn't about blaming Oxford, as the problems have affected
> other chipsets, it's about troubleshooting existing problems
> and avoiding future ones. Upgrade the firware.
>
>
> Art
>
>
>> there are no known problems with the 911 chip - there were problems
>> with the  922 chip and this was related to a problem with the Apple
>> firewire driver and an Oxford update was issued not long after 10.3.6
>> was released
>>
>> yes, some people have reported problems, but none are verifiable and
>> Oxford was not able to reproduce any errors in their labs
>>
>> Oxford has issued an update to fix the problem in 10.3.6, which Apple
>> finally fixed in 10.3.7
>>
>> 10.3.7 has a better firewire driver that fixes 99.9% of the problems
>> that people encountered in 10.3.6 and no firmware patch is required if
>> using 10.3.7
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