[G4] Firewire Fatique

[John Wilson]

No, as another repondent also mentioned, you do not have to unplug the 
drive. In fact, due to wear and tear on the ports of both your computer 
and the drive itself, you should not. In fact, if the drive case has 
two firewire ports, they remain available for use to daisy chain other 
devices. I too have an external firewire drive I use for backup and 
leave off, but plugged in, most of the time. I have my iPod cable 
plugged into the drive's other port and my Mac sees it and charges, 
updates, etc., even when the drive is off. This is the way firewire and 
external drives are supposed to work. Whoever wrote the manual that 
came with your drive is misinformed. The only exception I know of to 
any of this is if you're running OS X 3 (Panther) and have an external 
FireWire 800 drive, in which case you should not boot from the 
computer's internal drive with the external drive turned on, due to a 
bug in the first version(s) of Panther which can corrupt data on the 
external FW drive, even to the point of the inability to recover it. I 
think even that is now fixed with OS X 10.3.2. John

On Jan 5, 2004, at 9:26 PM, Anne Keller-Smith wrote:

> At 9:30 AM -0500 1/5/04, John Wilson wrote:
>> Hi Anne. Does the drive have an on/off switch? If so, unmount the 
>> drive
>> after you're finished backing up by dragging the drive icon to the
>> trash (which changes to the unmount icon as soon as you grab the drive
>> icon), then turn off the drive via the on/off switch. If you unplug 
>> the
>> drive while it's mounted you could possibly corrupt its data and 
>> should
>> get an error message. John
>
> So I don't have to unplug the drive? The manual specifically says to
> unplug the drive WHILE IT IS STILL ON, then turn it off.  Yes, that is
> after unmounting the drive. I've always faithfully done that.
>
> Anne Keller Smith