[1394] Re: FireWire drive likes G3s, hates G4s

[Richard Brown]

I use all ADS Pyro External Firewire drives, which use the Oxford 911 
chip.

They functioned perfectly on all MacOS versions UNTIL 10.2.4. In 
10.2.4, external FW drives will function at the get go, either booting 
the drives before or after the computer, but with NO activity, it turns 
out there is a glitch in 10.2.4 which issues a hardware level drive 
shutdown command to the external FW drives. A guru on the forums of the 
Mac Knowledgebase informed me of this problem. It is a fatal error, but 
does NOT cause data damage as far as I have been able to tell with 
many, many repetitions of the issue. The drive shutdown command is on a 
timer, starting from the last drive access. As I recall it is 15 
minutes, after which, all the external drives will be shut down (I have 
5 ADS drives externally, all go away), but to OS 10.2.4, there is no 
acknowledgment, and the drive icons remain. Trying to access a 10.2.4 
shut down FW drive is a mixed bag. You'd expect a "wake from sleep" 
thing... maybe yes, but usually NO. The forced shut down is NOT a 
normal sleep mode, it appears, and thus, of my five drives, one, two, 
maybe three might spin up, but usually more like one or two.

The solution maybe to make a constantly running Unix utility to poll 
the external drives all the time, to keep the 10.2.4 counter from 
hitting 15 minutes.

As to compatibility, the ADS drives have worked with TiBooks, G4 
Desktops, and G3's around here.

Richard Brown



On Thursday, April 3, 2003, at 09:01 AM, Mike Pickard wrote:

>> Message-ID: <list-5543512 at mail.ninewire.com>
>> Reply-To: "Macintosh FireWire List" 
>> <FireWire at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
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>> X-Original-Message-Id: <a05210500bab20114934b@[192.168.123.109]>
>> Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 09:21:30 -0600
>> From: Mike Pickard <mike at gerfnit.com>
>> Subject: [1394] Re: FireWire drive likes G3s, hates G4s
>> MIME-Version: 1.0
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"
>>
>> My Madlogix external Firewire drive mounts fine on my G3 B&W at home 
>> and an iBook at a local Apple Store.  But it doesn't show up at all 
>> on my Powerbook G4 12" or the store's desktop G4.  The difference 
>> seems to be the processor chip and/or the support chips in these 
>> machines.  Every one was running OS X 10.2.3 or.4.
>>
>> Has anyone come across a Firewire drive whose bridge card is CPU chip 
>> sensitive?
>>
>> Madlogix has disappeared from the Yahoo Mall or I'd ask them some 
>> questions.  Anybody with a Madlogix drive having better luck?
>>
>> Thanks for your assistance.
>
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