Hardware :: FW800 Enclosures (no Hard Disk) For IMac
May 20, 2010
So I am well on the way towards my 27" iMac. I have just finished transferring my files, work, backups and media from ext4 hard disks to hfs+ (via a combo of an OSX VM for disk util, and removing journaling/file-copying/re-enabling Journaling under ubuntu and the VM.
This has me left with 1.5TB and 2TB HFS+ disks and my old dual bay USB enclosure (an Icy Box). I now need to start looking for a good FW enclosure/s to home these two drives. I have had a look about and the Icy Dock dual bay (supporting raid and also JBOD - important for this) looks like a winner (waiting on techies to answer me about putting drives with data on them in the enclosure in JBOD as I dont want to lose data).
Are there any other options (most of the posts relate to single drive and/or supplied with disk enclosures). I really want something that is FW800 and lets me drop two disks in and just use them.
I may put up a wanted to see if someone has unused enclosures for sale (perhaps where they have removed the disks and put them in their shiny Mac Pro?)
I have a mid-2010 macbook pro 13". The other day, it crashed on wake-up, and would not boot. I had a OCZ Vertex SSD boot drive, and the OEM hard drive in an optibay enclosure (replaces the optical drive and used only for data). I used this setup for one year with no problems. After much troubleshooting, I found that I could see the SSD drive by booting into a recovery partition that I have on a USB stick, and putting the SSD in a USB enclosure. Then disk utility could see it, but not mount it. The label on the boot partition was "lion", but it changed to "disk1s2". I was able to repair the drive using disk utility, and then boot from it using the USB enclosure.Once booted, I could still see the OEM hard drive with no problems. So I powered down and put the SSD back inside the case and rebooted. It booted in safe mode, but it booted fine. The next time I rebooted, it would not boot. I swapped the OEM drive and the SSD drive, and then the sytem booted with no problems and I was able to use both drives.
One day later, I noticed my OEM drive was no longer mounted in OSX. I took it out, put it in a USB enclosure, and OSX could see it fine. There were no errors on the disk. I put it back in the macbook and reboot but OSX couldn't see it.So, the primary SATA port seems to be working intermittently. Three times now, a drive has stopped working on this port. Each time, I could use the drive in an external enclosure (or using the other SATA port normally used for the optical drive. Does anyone have any ideas? Could it just be the cable?I'm trying to make this computer last at least another month or so because I need to upgrade to a larger model, and am holding out for the 2012 release.
I have been searching through the internet looking for a comprehensive list of sorts, but to no avail. Having perused through the various set up threads in the picture gallery, I noticed that many members have external hard drive enclosures that markedly resemble the mac pro desktop. I was interested in purchasing one for myself, but didn't know of very many. Thus far, these are the ones I've got:
Mac Power Pleaides Macally Rosewil
I am sure there are many more, especially manufacturers of multi-HD enclosures. I was hoping to get your input to get some ideas of other manufacturers to consider.
I have just purchased a WD Studio Turbo extarnal/portable 320GB drive to use as a back-up and spare start-up disk. (I normally run Disk Warrior from an external.)
I have backed up my Macintosh HD to this WD drive using Super Duper and Super Duper indicates that everything has been copied ok.
However, when I plug in the FW800 cable to my MacBook Pro (old version) and restart holding down the Option key it doesn't show up as an alternative start-up disk.
I wasn't sure if it wouls be a bad idea if I wiped the interal hard drive while I'm booting from a recovery disk, then made a RAID 0 with the internal drive and my FW800 external drive. I'm nearing my max for the internal drive. I have a second FW400 drive backing up with Time Machine. I was hoping to just wipe, make the raid volume, and then restore from the Time Machine backup.
I guess even before that, my FW800 is not working in Lion. I reformatted while connected by USB, reset power management, and reset PRAM, but the firewire bus panics and takes out the Time Machine on FW400 as well. Is there a fix for this somewhere that I'm missing? I bought the FW800 drive for the above reason, only to run into a wall trying to make it work. I really don't want to do a RAID 0 with a USB connection.
I'm not going to try setting up the RAID 0 until I get the FW800 drive working reliably, but I was hoping to kill two birds with one stone.
Info: iMac (24-inch Early 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
I have been using a MBP for a few months now and I am making a total conversion from PC user to Mac user in January when I buy a nice new 24" iMac but to go with it, I want to buy a couple of new external hard drives. I have currently got a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB USB Drive which is Windows Formatted and I will be keeping that to use with my work laptop (a Dell), and I have been really pleased with its reliability. Anyway, I have been looking around and there are some fab drives on the market but I have a couple of questions. If I get an iMac with a 500GB Internal Hard Drive, how big an External hard drive will I need to use Time Machine without having to delete backups all the time?
Also, I have been primarily looking at the new Seagate FreeAgent drives and the do a PC version (USB) and a Mac version (USB/FW400/FW800), but the 640GB USB version costs �76 whereas the 500GB FW version costs �100. Would you go for the bigger size or the added benefits of FW800? Will I notice much speed difference between USB and FW800?
I bought a MacAlly GS350SUAB hard drive enclosure for the firewire 800 port. Before I made the purchase, I looked around for some FW800 drive xbench scores and found a few results:
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When I ran the xBench disk test on my drive, I was unimpressed. They weren't much better than when I plugged it in using the USB port.
I thought maybe xBench was sucking, so I timed how long it took to write a 831MB file to the drive using both USB and FW800, and it was actually faster (marginally) on USB. FW800 took 30 seconds, while USB took 28. Something doesn't seem right. Does anyone have any thoughts on why this could be? I do have a FW400 audio interface hooked up, but that is of course plugged in to the FW400 port and shouldn't make a difference. The hard drive I'm using came out of a Seagate FreeAgent. Is it possible it's just a really slow drive?
Could anyone recommend an external (FireWire 800) Hard Drive that they're using without issues with a Power Mac G5 (mine is a Dual Processor 2.3)?? I bought a couple of WD My Book Studio Edition but have no end of problems on FW800, and looking around here so is everyone else. LaCies seem to have similar problems, plus my own experiences in selling these and seeing FW ports falling off the enclosure's board, etc., puts me off them. Maxtors seem to have different issues and the new brown and orange Seagates are too fugly to even consider. So, anyone recommend a solution (250-500GB) that works fine with FW800 on a dual PMG5??
I bought a brand new Seagate 400Gb hard drive for my PowerMac G4 MDD FW800. I installed it in the back bay, as a slave drive. When I power on the Mac, I get a blank grey screen. The original hard drive with OS 10.4.11 is set as the master, so I don't know why it won't boot properly. I've checked for bent pins, and I don't see any obvious ones, so I'm completely confuzzled.
1) What would you guys say the best bang for your buck FireWire 800 is? I hear a lot of differing opinions on this one, so I'd like a couple suggestions, need over 500GB though. 750GB and up would probably be the best.
2) I've got 2 PATA hard-drives from my old Windows PC that crashed, what would you guys suggest doing about getting the data off of them? Most of the hard drive kits I found are for SATA, and the one I found for PATA was like $50 at Best Buy, I just want to get the data off these hard drives and junk 'em. I don't need bells and whistles and fancy enclosures.
This is in regards to the 2010 mini. I have been reading up on SSD, Hybrids and FW800 with a 7200. What is the easiest AND most effective/cost effective solution? If I went he FW800 route, can I use the same drive as my data storage drive? Will there be enough headroom to run the OS over FW and use the drive to stream movies playing in another room on Apple TV2 simultaneously? Will this give me a performance increase over the internal 5400 if I use the external 7200 for everything over FW800?
That is where my thoughts about the hybrid come into play. I know I can stream the iTunes content over USB2, which I have at the moment for the big drive. I would need to go buy an enclosure with FW800 to run it as a boot drive. I could use that same money and go get a 500GB Hybrid drive and install myself and leave the USB2 as data only. If the install is painless but tedious, I might just do that. If the FW800 route would be robust enough to run the OS and stream data to other devices simultaneously (ie use it as I would the regular internal drive), I might just do that and wait for SSD prices to come tumbling down and do a bigger internal SSD in the future.
My new 27" i7 is supposed to be delivered next week, got the SATA cables for installing my own SSD, but am a bit doubtful as to where placing my Scratch space. So, I will end up with an iMac with two internal drives (SSD + HDD).OS, System Library and Applications go to the internal SSD (120GB).
As I will be using FCS (besides CS package and other smaller programms) I would like to set up a dedicated Scratch drive for it.
Which of the following options would you go for, and why?:
1: install scratch space on the internal HDD together with all the other data (pics, music, videos - space is not the issue with a 2TB drive). Would a partition be advisable in this case, since I heard that partitioning slows a disc down considerably.
2: install scratch space on the internal HDD (scratch only), and all other files (pics/music/video) on an external FW800 HDD.
3: install scratch space on the external FW800 HDD (all other files on the internal HDD like usual).
4: use an external RAID backup as scratch space as well (something like the Drobo) with a FW800 connection.
I was looking for feedback on using the Drobo not only as a backup, but also as a scratch - some people found it great working, others not so much...I'd like to find out, if that has to do with the FW800 bottleneck, or if a Drobo scratch is even slower than an external FW800 HDD would be. I know that eSata would be faster, but that is currently out of reach (besides the OWC mod.).
I know it may sounds stupid to ask, I am thinking of partitioning my 500GB hard disk to 200GB and 300GB, with the 300GB holding the OS. Is it a good idea? Have anyone done it before? Any unwanted effects?
The problem is that the mac will not boot period.When I press the Option on start up, it takes me to a screen where I could select to boot from the Macintosh Hard disk or Recovery 10.9 disk.Choosing either of these still does not boot up the computer.
I think that the hard disk is damaged but what I do not understand is why I can still get the option to choose the Hard disk or the Recovery disk.I am waiting to hear from Apple Support on when I can take my imac to the genius bar and I was wondering if there is anything I can do before then. Intel imac 27-inch bought refurbished in November 2010 with imac apple care.Intel quard core processor, 4 Gig RAM, 1 terabyte HD
I have my iMac since August. I use it a lot, and I've noticed that the hard disk makes read and write noise a lot of times, even using Safari, for example. It looks like fragmented. What can I do?
G5 iMac model A1058, 1.8/512mb/160gb.Bought this machine used on e-bay with no operating system, powers on fine, flashing folder with question mark= no operating system. Tried to connect to my i-book in target disk mode via fire wire and the hard drive does not mount on the desktop. Can't find it in disk utilities however i get this in system profiler under firewire.
Okay. So I had an Imac G5 (white) running 10.4 This one crashed and I got a new iMac G5 (Silver). Since then I have removed the old hard drive. Today I connected it to a Serial ATA - USB Converter. It powers up and sounds to be working fine (hums, spinning) but my new computer says "Disk is unreadable". It gives me the option to format, but I want to recover my old files first.
Important: I also have a similar Lacie external drive that I hooked up the same way and it worked fine. I was able to take the files off of it.
My guess: I believe when the drive is connected, it is trying to start up the OS (this was the start up disc). It has that click sound like it's trying to make the chime and then spinning like it's working. Can you change the drive to a "Slave"? Or is my disc corrupted?
I turned on my iMac (20in 2008 model) and after the apple logo appears, I get a gray screen that says "process 1 exec of sbin/launched failed". I'm pretty sure it's because my hard disk is full. I tried booting up in safe mode, but my wireless keyboard battery died. I put in new batteries, but I need to get to the desktop to reconnect the keyboard. I tried using a usb wired keyboard, but it doesn't power up until I'm on the desktop screen. I don't know what else to do. I need a keyboard to boot to safe mode, but I need to be fully booted to work the keyboard.
So there's an enclosure that has oxford 934dsp and it has two fw 800 ports on it. I also have an OWC Voyager that has the same chipset and it doesn't pass thru any bus power and this is something that has to be powered by an ac adapter. OWC support told me that this is because of the 934dsp chipset and I'm skeptical of this claim. I suspect that there are enclosures out there than can pass thru bus power over firewire 800 regardless of chipset used.
So here is my bright idea. I still may want to have Windows on my iMac for work projects *sigh* I think I came up with a solution, I rather not partition my iMac (when I buy it) 1TB drive for Windows. Don't want Windows on my main disk - I need the storage for Mac things, personal stuff etc. Is it possible to boot from a Firewire connected external HDD to run Windows?
My 500gb iMac (purchased April 2010) is about at capacity. 350gb of space is taken up by home movies (.mov) in iMovie. I bought an external hard drive and have moved about 200gb over to that drive.
After transfer, I deleted the original Events off iMovie and emptied the trash. I checked in both iMovie and in Finder and no longer see those files present on the Mac.
I thought this was going smooth and everything worked perfectly, but….when i went to check how much storage space i created on the Mac, the amount of available space barely budged (i moved 200gb of data to the new drive and i created about 30gb of space on the Mac).
Are these "deleted" files hidden somewhere and I need to go delete from somewhere else? How do I make sure I get back the storage that i need?
I am considering purchasing diskwarrior but want to make sure it can help my situation before I purchase it. My imac will not boot from the internal hard drive (Intel processor) When I use disk utility to try and repair the disk, I get error messages and it won't repair. I can see the HD but cannot repair it. When I connect using target mode with my mac book pro, the hard drive does not appear on my host (macbook pro) computer. I have reloaded OS X (Leopard) onto a firewire external drive and can boot my imac that way but I can not find my original internal Macintosh HD. Will disk warrior be able to help with this scenario. I would really like to access that internal Macintosh HD and retrieve my files.
I have a 2TB Western Digital My Book Studio FW800 external that has 5 partitions, connected to my 2011 iMac. I had help doing the partitions and don't really remember the reasoning, but one is just for my SuperDuper! backup, one is Miscellaneous, one for movie clips off my camcorder, one for misc scanned photo's and one for my genealogy research. I back up using Time Machine to a Time Capsule and also to this WD hard drive with SuperDuper!
Recently I'm getting a pop up message that "Mac OS X can't repair the disk "Genealogy"'. And it needs to be reformatted. It's become a read only disk. When I look in Disk Utility it shows all the partitions as "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" EXCEPT for the one in question. I also noticed that there are a lot of files with "date created" being the same date in 1969! These files may be letters I've written or photo's I added to that partition within the last few years.
I think I have to completely reformat the entire external hard drive to repair this, but I want to make sure. Because it's going to be a major hassle backing it all up to another external (having to get one first) and then figuring out how to make the files that have turned "read only" in that one partition, back to their original state! Does this sound right, that I have to reformat the entire external hard drive? And how do I get the read-only files back to their original state.
Recently I purchased an external hard disk, to put all of my pictures of my baby due to space limitations on my internal laptop drive. Since my Canon camera 10 megapixel pictures take up a ton of space this was occurring at an alarming rate. My intention was also to back up to DVD but never got to it. This is both a comment and a question.
Now said baby, is getting really good at pulling cords etc. He managed to do this on the external drive firewire cable. As far as i know the drive was not in the process of actually writing. However, after a few minutes and trying to re-plug the drive the OS crashed with a Grey Screen of Death hardware error that tells you that you need to push the power button..
This apparently corrupted the drive's directory. Upon reboot the drive would not mount. Since there were time machine backups on the drive too Diskwarrior was not able to reconstruct the drive in the built in memory available on the computer. Time machine stores millions of files and Diskwarrior apparently wants to keep it all in memory at once. Since my computer has 2GB you would hope that would be enough but apparently not. So that failed. Other utilities seemed to be able to find the files but not restore the directory. I also took it to the apple store they were not able to recover it.
I have to say this is extremely distressing, and hard to believe that a simple accident like this could cost the loss of thousands of pictures. I did send it to a rescue company but that was expensive but I think apple needs to do something about this situation.
On Windows there is a way to disable the write cache for external drives. This is not available for Mac OS X. This would prevent this rather common occurrence of a plug accidentally becoming disengaged when the drive is not in the process of writing. This reduces the odds but I still think apple, in order to become clearly superior, needs a better solution.
I know Apple has experimented with ZFS would this not eliminate this possibility of this kind of disaster? Is this in Snow Leopard desktop? I know they are thinking this is a business customer focused technology but clearly if it can eliminate this kind of thing then I think it is extremely useful to their non server customers. Perhaps there are other ways of dealing with this issue but ZFS is designed to deal with these issues. HFS+ is extremely fragile to disk corruption.
I know my situation is not that uncommon and this is not the first time this has happened to me with an external drive. You would think I had learned. I hate to think of how many other people have had the same thing happen to them.
I've download a Seagate Diagnostics programme to check whether my external Seagate FreeAgent Desk is working properly or not. However, when I run the programme, it indicates that cannot find the disk.
