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

[Art McGee]

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