[X4U] PPC 9600 issue

[Ted Burton]

At 9:33 AM +0100 on 12/14/04, Antonino Cuscina' spoke about [X4U] PPC 
9600 issue thusly:

>i have a problem with my PPC 9600/OS 9.1 and two firewire hds 
>connected to it, that is,
>i can't copy files to and from the two firewire and the internal 
>hds, i mean can transfer
>small files of say 4 kb like aliases but when i try to pass larger 
>ones the copy window
>stuck and freezes the mac which i have to restart; i can copy files 
>through the internal hds
>with no problem and the strange thing is that the same error comes 
>also when i try to transfer
>files from one firewire hd to the second and vice-versa

I once owned a G3/266 that has been handed off to a son at college, 
and now use a G4 PowerBook. An external FW hard drive used with the 
G3 misbehaved as you describe above. The FW ran off a PCI card with 
USB and FW ports. With the G3, with which I used the FW drive for a 
year or more, what you describe drove me up the wall. Under OS X the 
behavior turned out to be a Finder crash. The chip set in the FW 
drive turned out to be relevant as well in some chatter I was reading 
at the time. An Oxford chip set was preferred.

With my G4 PowerBook the external FW drive works like a charm.

It strikes me as a hypothesis only, that the FW drive could send and 
demand data too fast for the card to handle, or the card the same 
with the PCI bus, somehow or other.
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