I 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.
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)?
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?
My 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.Â
Running OSX 10.6.8 on a Mac Pro (2008) The hard dirves I'm connecting are Lacie.Â
I 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?
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.
My 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.
My 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?
My 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
Can 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.
A Verbatim Store 'N' Go 4GB is not even recognised by Mac OSX 10.5.6 when plugged in. Is this to be expected and can the Mac OS be configured to recognice it?
[URL] Though I've never done it myself, I've gleaned that it's possible to partition/raid multiple HDs together to act as 1 HD Might it be possible to do the same to lots of Flash Drives serially linked with USB hubs? 1 USB port -> 1 hub (7 USB ports) -> 7 hubs (49 USB ports) -> 49 hubs (343 USB ports)
USB hubs /can/ be really cheap (given patience, they could probably be acquired for $3 per 7-port hub) If you go to conventions and stuff like that, they literally give away flash drives with the company's info on them. not the largest around, but I've seen 512MB (maybe larger now? that was several years ago) to get 343 ports, you would need 57 hubs ($171) 343 free 512MB flash drives cardboard box 18x18x18" (if each hub is 7x2x1", then 57 would take up 7x19x6") This would be big, but not ungodly so. This would give us 171.5 GB. (343 GB if each drive is 1GB) I'm not sure of the power requirements of these drives - might have to get hubs with own power supplies. anyways - is this possible? would it work how I think? USB 2.0 offers faster data transfer than SSD, but I don't know the speeds of flash drives.
I purchased a 16GB PNY Attache and cloned my hard drive before I installed anything on it. My only reason is for backup and to run a few utilities. It seems to be a little leisurely when I boot from it though. Does anybody know if there are faster read and write ones or is this as good as it gets?
I just inserted a brand new flash drive into my macbook, a 16 gig sandisk cruzer. I thought the system would ask me to reformat it, but it didn`t. It looks like i can add and delete files without any problem, though. Is it ok to use this same drive to share files between my windows and mac? will there be any kind of format issues or problems? Just asking to be sure I won`t do anything wrong before I pop it in my pc lol
BEFORE I started experiencing problems with my HD, a year or so ago, and before it crashed, I made this backup (see "GREY_USB"). At that time, I was using iMovie 06 to produce video DVD's for animations of clients' products and business plans. AFTER my system crashed (and a move to the other side of the planet!), I was finally able to have my Powerbook rebuilt and restored (see 3 attachments beginning "BLACKORANGE".)
Only after getting fully settled here, did I realise iMovie is apparently not installed....at least, not as far as I can tell. Some version of it may be on one of these USB flash drives, but it's been so long since I tinkered with any of this alchemy, I don't remember a flaming thing about how to go about checking. Is it possible to view only, without downloading anything, exactly what applications/data are on BOTH flash drives, then, IF the iMovie dmg is still on one of them, to install it?
I'd prefer not to install iMovie 08 unless that's all I have; the expense of having to fit Final Cut into the budget right now is absolutely out of the question. If you need more details or info, let me know. As my signature indicates: Powerbook G4, Mac OS X 10.4.11 w/Safari 4.04, iLife 08, occasionally running external LaCie HD (well, when I find it and unpack it).
I can plug in an external USB keyboard and mouse however I can not mount and USB flash drives or USB external disks. I get the following error message:
kernel Flash Disk : family specific matching fails
I am running OSX 10.5.8 on a 15" Macbook Pro 2.53 Ghz. Apple Care has not be very helpful so far. I've verified/repaired disk permissions with lo luck.
I have a 2008 (2/2008) 24" aluminum imac that is not recognizing certain USB flash drives now. The drive (Sony 8gb) worked before but does not now. When started up with the drive in a USB port, system profiler will find it but disk utilities will not (nor does it appear on my desktop). I have tried all other USB ports in this computer with no results. This drive still works fine on all other macs in the house. This problem is isolated only to flash drives since all other USB accessories still function fine. I recently added a Sandisk imagemate all-in-one card reader to this system and suspect that this might have caused the problem since oddly enough, my Sandisk flash drive still works fine. The only driver I installed with this reader was the application start up button (to launch iphoto).
I have an aluminum numeric keyboard. and when I plugged in two scandisk Cruzer usbdrives it said that one of them wasn't getting enough power. So I read online and saw that some people said windows can provide enough power for both. So I turn on my virtual windows machine (which automatically mounted the usb drive that was connected) and then my mac was able to mount the second usb drive! But when I let windows try to host both drives in the keyboard windows said it couldn't power both devices either! this may just be because it was a vm.
But my point is at one time I had access to both drives in my keyboard(with one os for each one) but when using just a single one it wont work. Is there any way to change a setting so I can push out more power to my usb keyboard? I'm perfectly fine with terminal and editing files, but is there a setting to change anywhere?(it's only getting 300mA and the usb drives need 200 each and the keyboard itself needs 20 so that all fits in the 500mA range).
MacBook Pro "13-inch, Late 2011", 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 // RAM= 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Mac OS X 10.9.4 "Mavericks" (13E28)Â
The problem:
None of my USB Flash drives are accessible in Finder.Â
The drives do technically "Mount" properly - they show up in Disk Utility, with the "Unmount" & "Eject" buttons available (indicating it's mounted), and they're mounted to the path /Volumes/<Disk Name>. Also, the disks show up in the Finder Sidebar with the correct name etc.
However, If I click on the Finder icon for the drive, the window flashes white for a millisecond and then reverts back to whatever the window showed before (eg. my home folder's contents). Finder will not access them. This has occurred on 3 different USB Flash drives (all of the ones I own!), which are formatted for ye olde windoze, FAT16 or FAT32 (aka. MS-DOS).
The drives operate perfectly normally on an iMac running OS X 10.8.5 (accessible in Finder). I was able to copy files to/from & list the contents of the Flash drives normally.Â
In Disk Util. I can Unmount & re-mount without error. If I unplug the disk I get the expected "This disk was not unmounted properly" banner. Eject via DiskUtil appears to work properly without error, causing the disk to vanish from Disk Utility (as expected).
The directory /Volumes does not show the drive's directory (just "Macintosh HD") - in fact the first time I list /Volumes/ after plugging in a drive, it appears to show some folder in /Volumes that is quickly removed (kind of scrolls-up into itself) as soon as the /Volumes directory is listed - was it my drive playing hide-and-seek??
The Eject button / option (in right-click menu) is not available in the Finder.
If I use Finder > Go To Folder… and type in the "Mount Point" from Disk Utility, I get a "folder not found" error.Â
In DiskUtil, if I right-click the drive name and select Reveal In Finder…, strangely the folder will actually show up in /Volumes, and I can open the folder and view the drive contents (sometimes I have to Reveal it twice for it to work)! I was also able to create a new folder after this (which did show up on the iMac as well). However, if I tried to copy and files to the Flash drive, I get either
The operation can’t be completed because one or more required items can’t be found. (Error code -43)
(when I try to drag a file into the newly created folder on the Flash drive), or
The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8058).
(if I drop a file on the Flash drive's root directory, or try to copy a file form the Flash drive to my computer).Â
I have tried DiskUtil/"Repair Disk" on the flash drives, which doesn't show any errors or warnings (they appear to be ok - again they work fine on another Mac).
I also did a "Repair Permissions" on my MacBook, to no avail.Â
I seem to remember having this same problem on OS X 10.8 at some point last year, and think I solved it via an online hint, but I have yet to re-find that solution (I'm on OS 10.9 now).Â
Info: MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4), USB Flash Drives formatted as FAT16
I am here because I am interested in buying my first Mac Laptop. I would be mainly using this in my High School during Lunch and Study hall to work on projects and research. My school only uses Apple computers so I don't think there will be a networking problem(heard there can be some unfriendly networks towards macs?). I have been looking into THIS I Book sold used by [URL]it dose not have a airport card (I dont know what that is) and the CD drive doesn't work but that doesn't bother me because I mainly use flash drives and SD cards.
I don't understand why after 4 Apple Repair Depot visits my MB Pro is STILL killing several USB FLASH and external hard drives a week. It has consistently done this since the day I bought it. I have fried a large variety of FLASH Memory sizes, shapes, through all USB ports and even through attached hubs. Once my mac does this to a USB device, it is no longer recognizable by any Mac or PC ever again. Unrecognized, it doesn't even leave an opportunity for Disk Utility to reformat, rewrite, perform first aid, verify...nothing. Third-party formatters don't work either. It also doesn't seem to matter what brand, size, or port I use. For a certain period the devices would become very hot and sometime actually melt into puddles of liquid plastic and metal.
On the 4th depot dispatch for this issue they did replace the mother board USB ports and EVERYTHING ELSE but the display hard drive, and case. This stopped the heating and melting problem, but I'm still frying the devices and rendering them unrecognizable. Does anyone have ANY IDEA of what may be causing this? Is there anything I can do to stop or prevent it? Apple sure can't explain it much less fix it. This is a huge EXPENSIVE problem, and I can't seem to get past it, and I'm in an endless loop of sending in in for constant repairs. WHat can be done to stop or prevent this from happening?
I use Paragon HFS+ for Windows which allows me to read and write to my HFS formatted drives. It works great for any external hard drive I use but when I use a flash drive it doesn't work. I format both my external hard drives and flash drives the same way, I use Disk Utility, I format them using Mac Extended Journaled and GUID partition scheme. When plugging in my flashdrive, my Windows 7 PC will not mount them. Disk Manager shows 3 partitions: EFI, Fat32 and some empty space. If I format my flash drives using the Master Boot Record partition scheme they work great.
So, here's what I have so far: External hard drives work fine when formatted with the GUID Partition scheme. (Mac extended journaled) Hard drives also show 3 partitions in Windows Disk Manager: EFI, HFS and empty spaceFlashdrives show 3 partitions but oddly enough the second partition shows as FAT32. But is completely unusable in Windows 7 Flash drives have to be formatted using the Master Boot Record partition scheme when formatting them as HFS+ volumes in order to work on Windows 7Windows 7 supports GUID partition schemes.
What is causing my Macbook Pro to treat an external hard drive differently then a flash drive when formatting them? Experience and common sense tells me that it shouldn't matter whether it's a flash drive or spindle drive, both should format the same. Granted, I could simply use exFat or FAT32 on my flash drives for cross platform compatibility however I prefer to use HFS+ when possible.
Info: MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2007 MBP, 2.16Ghz, 3 Gigs of RAM