[MacDV] Re: Hard drives

[Richard Brown]

OSX has had a real problem with firewire. I have 9 external firewire 
drives, and had the dreaded drive sleep, never to re-awake, and thus 
crash the computer menace haunting me for some time. 10.2.8 seems to 
have cleared up much of the mess... however, if you have earlier 
versions of OSX, you can use the Terminal program to send the following 
command to Unix, which, for me, fixed the freeze issue on earlier OSX 
versions:

 From Terminal (login first) type:

sudo pmset -a spindown 0

Hit return... and maybe issue the command again, just to be sure.

This will disallow the sleep command from OSX, which in some versions, 
is IMPOSSIBLE to turn off, as in: turn off hard disk sleep in that 
preference panel, and 15 minutes later (after no drive access,) the 
firewire drives sleep... subject of much discussion on the Apple 
message boards which led to the workaround mentioned above.

FYI the external Firewire cases I've found most reliable so far are the 
new ADS Firewire/USB 2.0 Pyro Cases, which also have a hardware level 
fix for the 137 GB barrier for older Macs. You get all the gigabytes... 
which is to say, if you look online, you can find the new Maxtor 
Maxline Drives - which are repurposed, enterprise level fiber channel 
drives now sporting an ATA interface. Unlike the current Maxtors, 
Western Digitals, and IBM Desktars, the Maxline has the fabled "million 
hour mean time between failure" boast, just like the good ol' days of 
super high priced SCSI. The hassle is, they are not good for internal 
G5 use due to the old ATA interface (unless you stoop to go backwards 
with PCI card.)

Look for the Maxtor Maxline Plus II series. I ordered 3 of the 250GB 
units from a discounter, and, as Maxtor, I guess, has not OFFICIALLY 
put the drives on the market due to the glut of lesser spec drives, 
they arrived, sans boxes, in just their static proof pouches, two with 
consecutive serial numbers, but all manufactured June 24, 2003. Will 
advise as to their robust nature as we are digitizing and editing part 
of a DV feature on them. They will be hammered 24/7.

Richard Brown



On Thursday, October 16, 2003, at 10:54 AM, rjn wrote:

> I have this problem, too, except for that certain drives will freeze 
> the OS at that point.