Does anyone have experience with how well USB drives work when connected to firewire drives. I have a LaCie drive that has a USB port. I am wondering how well it would connect to a USB external drive?
View 1 RepliesCan I attach multiple hard drives to my iMac chained by Firewire or do I need a separate port? I now have multiple Western Digital drives and find that sometimes they don't connect to the iMac so I'm wondering if I need a separate port or if my iMac FW port is faulty.
Info:
iMac 24", Mac OS X (10.5.6)
If I decided to end up going for a Mac Pro with pure speed, I would want to fill it with 4 SAS drives. I've heard that SAS drives are completely unrivaled in speed (15,000 rpm ), but does this really correlate to high speeds? Is Apple's RAID card the best solution for SAS drives? I would likely use RAID 5 setup for striping benefits as well as data redundancy.
Now, I'm a bit of a storage junkie, and SAS drives won't be a viable storage solution for everything I have already (and even more in the future), so external storage would be a must. I have a drobo already, and it is a much cheaper solution than getting something like an Xserve RAID, and firewire 800 is plenty fast for streaming video, even to multiple sources.
As the G-Drives feature two firewire ports, does anyone know if it's possible to use the 2nd one as an input device (as if it were a mini-hub for your Mac)?
View 3 Replies View RelatedI really don't want a USB flash drive. USB sucks eggs simply because FireWire can do so much more (TDM, transfer speeds, etc.) OCZ was going to make a FireWire flash drive; heck, they had a FireWire 800 version built! Does anyone know of any FireWire flash drives? 800 is certainly preferable, since 400 is currently dead.
View 24 Replies View RelatedMy Mac Pro is not mounting any new hard drives for some reason. The one's already connected work fine and remain connected (I have three drives connected via eSATA ports). But I can't connect any drives via Firewire 800 or 400. I've tried differnt leads and different ports but none are connecting. I've tried the drive on a different Mac and it connected fine. But on the machine I need to connect to the drives simply dont mount. Nor do they show up in Disk Utility or Soft RAID. I have restarted and powered down several times but nothing is working.
Running OSX 10.6.8 on a Mac Pro (2008) The hard dirves I'm connecting are Lacie.
Info:
Mac Pro (2008), Mac OS X (10.6.7)
is there a USB 2.0 > FW800 adapter that exists?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI have a real quick question about daisy chaining some firewire drives. I'm looking at buying an OWC Mercury for my macmini. I'm going to connect it via FW800. Can I then daisy chain a FW400 device to the OWC? The drive has 2 FW800 ports but only 1 FW400 so can this be done?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI just bought a 1TB Seagate extreme. On the box it said it only supports PC and I actually had some trouble formatting it with Disk Utility. Everywhere I've searched says to create (for a bootable backup) a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) GUID scheme. The drive shows up fine both in Tiger (10.4.11) on the mini, and Leopard (10.5.6) on the MacBook via USB. When you plug in via firewire (which is kinda the point) - the LED's don't come on (or even flash) but the disk still spins up.
I have done a power cycle, unplugged everything for 10 minutes, reset the PRAM, and trashed a few caches. and yes. I tried another Firewire cable and I know the firewire port works. Before you reply, also note that I unplugged all the USB devices and tried both firewire ports on the hard drive about 100 times. I have no way to test if Firewire works on the MacBook (with Leopard instead of Tiger) because I have no firewire port. Plugging in the USB cable for power doesn't do anything, and i can't switch from USB first, then to Firewire - it's almost like the data port doesn't switch (but LED's stay on).
Has anyone seen anything indicating that there are any new (higher capacity) drives on the horizon in with a 2.5" external FW800 format?
I'm slightly confused why many of the big brands have stopped at 500GB or 640GB drives in their FW800 models. The G-Drive Mini only goes to 500GB, while the WD Passport Studio stops at 640GB. WD do have 2.5" drives at 1TB, and have dine for months, but they're only available in USB2 models.
Any ideas why they all seem to stop short of their highest capacity drives for the faster interfaces? The only ones i can find with 1TB 2.5" drives are the Seagate GoFlex (which i'm not sure about with the swappable interfaces, i've nearly bought one a couple of times but then changed my mind at the last minute), or a couple of companies i've never heard of before who have drives way above the expected price.
Ideally someone will have seen news from WD or G-Tech or someone indicating that new products are on the way. Otherwise, i may end up having to get the GoFlex.
After a fiasco with two firewire hard disks (the courier company lost them), I have to purchase an external firewire HD. Once the insurance company refunds my money (which can take up to 90 days), I still want to get the other 2 disks I ordered. Is there a limit on how many firewire drives I can daisy chain? I was thinking on having all 3 hard drives daisy-chained to my iMac.
View 9 Replies View RelatedMy time machine drive conked out this morning, so I need to get a new drive, and I am planning on either a Western Digital MyBook or an OWC of some sort. (Any thoughts?) So here's what I'd like to do. Once I get the backup running again, I'm interested in running a RAID 1 with two external drives. But the catch is this---I have a late model MacBook, so I've only got two USB 2.0 ports. Here's what I'd like to know. Is it possible to chain things together this way: MacBook <--USB-- First HDD <--FW-- Second HDD That is, connect the first drive to the computer via USB (the only option) and the second to the first HDD via firewire.
View 24 Replies View RelatedMy MBP has one firewire 800 port and I have one external firewire drive. I want to get another external firewire drive but since I only have one FW port, does that mean I can only use one drive at a time? There are times when I know I will need to transfer files from one external drive to another. Is there a way to daisy chain external firewire drives together? Also, will daisy chain slow down the file copy process or even slow down my computer?
View 4 Replies View RelatedDoes anyone have any good suggestions for connecting a DV port of a camcorder to the new MacBook which lacks a firewire port?
View 5 Replies View RelatedWould someone please tell me the steps to connect my MacBook to my Emac, so that I can transfer some files between them? I have a firewire cord plugged in to both. I thought I should use Sharing but the harddrive never appeared on the desktop. I know it's probably done very simply, but I just don't know how.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI'm thinking of getting the new MacBook which only has USB ports. I have a Firewire/USB hard drive that I'll connect via USB. Can I connect another HD that's firewire only to that drive?
View 4 Replies View RelatedMy external drives transfer very slowly on my MacPro. I've been searching for answers and have turned up very little.
Just to make a note, I measured my disk speeds with both AJA System Test and copying files between drives and reading the Disk Activity in Activity Monitor.
I have 3 external drives, all MyBook Premium or Professional, 1x 500GB, 1x 1TB and 2x 1TB in RAID 0. I had them on Firewire 400 and the RAID 0 2TB one on Firewire 800. My transfers on FW were all around 24MB/sec on all drives (much less than what I should be getting with FW400). I then read somewhere that the FW bus on the MacPro uses the slowest speed connected for all FW connections. So I unplugged everything but the FW800 Raid 0 drive and my transfer rate jumped to 40-60MB/sec. This is much better, but still about half or so of what I expect it should be producing from an external RAID 0 setup.
To keep my FW800 backup drive faster, I've plugged the other two into USB2.0. The transfer speeds on both drives are now hideous, around 10-15MB/sec. This is so slow, but I'm not sure what to try to fix my speeds.
The HD's in the external drives are all 7200rpm, and all should be transferring at a higher rate. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Ideally I'd like to get everything transferring at rates they should be transferring at, but I'll settle with my current FW800 speed of 40-60MB/sec if I can get my other two drives transferring at a non-snail pace.
Is this a common issue? I can't believe I'm the only one plugging multiple external hard drives into their Mac Pro. I hope someone has a fix or solution for this. I'm all ears!
System: Mac Pro (early 2008) Mac OS X (10.5.5) 3.2Ghz 8-core - 16GB Ram - 4x1TB SATA - GeForce 8800GT - Dell 30" 3008WFP A02 - Gateway 21" FPD2185W - 3xMyBook external drives
I'm wondering about drawbacks or benefits of creating a chain of two FireWire drives looped back to one computer. I intend to setup two external 1TB drives as either a single 2TB concatenated RAID array or a striped RAID 0 array to be used as a Time Machine backup volume. All ports and cables are FireWire 400.
The setup in question would be:
Setup 1 (loop)
Mac FireWire Port 1<--->External Drive A FireWire Port 1/External Drive A FireWire Port 2<--->External Drive B FireWire Port 1/External Drive B FireWire Port 2<--->Mac FireWire Port 2......................
Macbook Pro 17" Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz. Following a logic board replacement for a separate issue. I have two external Firewire 800 Hard drives (two separate brands and sizes) which have suddenly started unmounting randomly and giving the 'hardware removal error'. A few seconds after unmounting they mount again, only to unmount a minute later with the error again. It is now doing this in a loop.I have done the following things:
1. rebooted and checked all cable connections
2. I have tried this with the two disks plugged in separately and daisychained.
3. I have tried two separate Firewire 800 cables.
4. running the Disk Utility.
5.installing the system from scratch on a freshly formatted internal disk.
6. reinstalling again with an archive and install.
Everything seems to work fine with a Firewire 400 connection.The only software setting that I changed is to disable the "Put Hard Disks to Sleep when possible" option in the Energy Saver system prefs. Any connection? I have enabled this again and so far (a couple of hours) so good.Should I be looking at a hardware issue
Windows 7 has been awesome so far, but there are still the occasional driver issues. What I'm having trouble with now is firewire. I used to use HFS Explorer to access my external (HFS formatted) hard drive but it no longer shows up in HFS Explorer. Windows doesn't even make the "device connected" sound when I turn it on (yes I'm running HFS Explorer in admin mode/Vista compatibility). Pretty sure it's a firewire driver issue, but I have no clue who makes the firewire for my early 08 MBP.
View 12 Replies View RelatedI'm trying to decide between these two drives:
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I'm wondering if the speed difference with Firewire 400 over USB 2.0 is worth the extra $30. I'll primarily be using this for Time Machine backup, but also to store other large files when necessary.
I connect 2 Iomega external disks and in the system profile I see them under the firewire tab.
I tried them on my macbook and it found them right away.
But on the mac mini they dont get mounted or it is like it is not proberly finding them What can be the problem?
Can I install a Raid Controller and connect say two drives to it, specially for windows? Will it be bootable? Or perhaps even connect the iPass of the four internal bays to an Adaptec 5405 and get a separate cable for my Mac Drive. Will both be bootable? What if I just want to boot Windows for now? I sometimes need to convert my early 2008 Mac Pro into a rather beefy Windows workstation and the lack of HW Raid is rather irritating.
View 1 Replies View RelatedBought the new iMac. I have one La Cie 1-TB external HD from previous Mac that I want to hook up to this new one, plus I want to daisy chain a La Cie 160g HD to that one. What driver do I need, and how do I hook them all up?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI currently have my second MBP that I got from Macmall and both in a matter of two weeks have had similar issues. The first I managed to get returned and replaced, that is a seperate and complicated story in and of itself. This particular issue started with a boot up sequence that was taking about 5-6 mins. After going through the drill with Applecare thought I could restore using Time Machine. That's when I found out that the FW400 port no longer worked to power my Oyen Digital 250G FW drive. Any thoughts as to what might be the problem? This is my second MBP and Oyen Digital FW drive. I had them both replaced!
View 10 Replies View RelatedI just got a Mac Mini (March 2009 model) and want to connect it via Firewire to my Sony TRV-22 camcoder. The camcorder has a Mini DV Firewire jack on it (I think this is called a 4-pin connector sometimes too). But on the Mac Mini, I can't tell if I need a 6-pin or a 9-pin. Can someone point me to a good cable so I can dump some MiniDV tapes into iMovie?
View 5 Replies View RelatedI googled it and it didn't help out as much. I have this Shure Mic and it has MIDI input and would like to have some kind of adapter to firewire. I know there is an USB adapter, but i would like to use firewire. It can be firewire 400 or 800. I like to record some songs for GarageBand.
View 3 Replies View Relatedcan I put firewire connector 400 in the firewire port 800?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
I'm looking at the specs page for the MacBook Pro and it reads this...
Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Choose a hard drive with a faster speed for greater performance. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability.
Basically suggesting that the HDD option has a performance advantage over the SSD, but is this the case? I always thought SSDs could read & write quicker because they use solid-state flash memory as opposed to hard disks.
I want to go with the 256GB SSD but I want to know how it ranks in speed.
i need more firewire ports for my macbook, do they sell firewire hubs?
where can i find them?i googled for it, but it was very confusing, found a lot of USB hubs and some other stuff, but not a FIREWIRE HUB perse.
