[MacDV] Re: WD Firewire drives/Aftermarket FW drive cases--MacDV Digest #2647

[Richard Brown]

I have 15 ADS Firewire cases, usually with 8-12 online at any given 
time 24/7... I have every flavor of the ADS case since they started 
with Oxford chipsets. The best, by far, is the dual USB 2.0 - Firewire 
400 external case, but sadly, it is MOST reliable under USB, not 
Firewire. Mac users are stuck, more or less, WITH Firewire. The beauty 
of the unit described is that it handles drives above 137 GB without 
issue, as in, can't wait for the Hitachi (formerly IBM) 400 GB units to 
ship.

Caveats:

1) The ADS cases (seldomly, but it happens) develop weird power supply 
issues, the net effect of which being it powers down drives, or cycles 
drives in a constant reboot cycle.  This locks up OS X, up to 10.3.3. 
Only ONE drive need have this problem to lock everything, and it can 
happen at, of course the worst possible moments. Additionally, you MUST 
make sure the AC power to the drive is PERFECT. Get an arc, and it 
fries your drive. Had a Maxtor Maxline 250GB (supposedly enterprise 
level) drive fry into oblivion on that one. And Maxlines are so new, 
none of the OS X drive utilities recognize it. The rule being: never be 
in a rush with ADS drives. The other rule is: forget Maxtor as a 
vendor. Our operation is on two coasts and the latest edict, from a 
GROWING pile of big, dead, drives is - NO MORE MAXTOR of any flavor. 
They cannot handle high demand (like editing) application.

2) If you are using older OS X, there is an OS issue, particularly back 
to 10.1.2, where a hardware shutdown command is issued from the OS to 
all external Firewire drives. If you see this behavior, and are 
frustrated from these lockups, the first thing you can do is: shut the 
Firewire drive down. It is not receiving or sending any data anyway, 
and it will not hurt data as a result. We did this a hundred times 
(easy) without issue, until an engineer and Unix guru (who discovered 
the anomaly) came up with a workaround: use the Terminal program, and 
issue the command:

sudo pmset -a spindown 0

This will tell OS X's  underlying Unix to NOT shutdown external 
Firewire drives. Works great, but WILL reveal if you suffer from No. 1, 
above.

And now for something completely different.

Unrelated to Firewire, but also an issue: under 10.3.3, Final Cut no 
longer exports to AIFF properly. Audio transitions turn to ever so 
slight, super annoying glitches... Tried it several times yesterday. 
OUCH... Workaround: export as DV, audio only. Works fine. The hassle 
being, exporting for audio sweetening in another PRG is now a bit of an 
issue, it would seem... And no, this did not happen prior to upgrading 
to the latest OS.

Richard Brown
www.go2rba.com


On Mar 22, 2004, at 11:19 PM, Ted Langdell wrote:

> Just picked up an ADS case at Frys, Sacramento.  $79.xx plus tax.  The 
> WD 60GB is in... and mounts as desired.  FCP project comes up OK.
>
> will be "burning in" the drive in the case overnight to see whether it 
> crashes the Firewire bus as the WD case/60GB combo and its 45GB series 
> brother did.