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.
Running OSX 10.6.8 on a Mac Pro (2008) The hard dirves I'm connecting are Lacie.
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 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
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.
G4 IMac, 10.4. I have a simpletech 1 tbite hard drive that does not mount almost always on my machine. I just brought it home from a friends where it does show up instantly. Ran disc utility for permissions on my imac, swapped cords. Power on before boot up, power on after, unplug firewire, etc., nothing works. I want to install OS X 10.4 on the drive to try & boot up my powerbook (panic kernel message there).
I upgraded my iMac G5 iMac 2.0Ghz (standard with 1.5Gb RAM) to Leopard 10.5.2 via the original installer DVD (OSX 10.4) and a Leopard upgrade DVD.
I backed up the internal HD to an external FW drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, then wiped my internal drive, which had been partitioned into 3 partitions, back into one journaled partition.
It was a smooth installation of OSX 10.4 and upgrade to 10.5 plus all necessary updaters. I let it install all the applications & settings from the previous system on the external FW HD. In the process I must have rebooted several times and my external FW drive still worked.
Once I had Leopard updated I set about tailoring my settings and UI. I set up Spaces and multiple tabs in DragThing when I got a kernel panic. I am not sure whether the panic happened in Spaces preferences or in DragThing.
Since then boot up has been extremely slow. 1m 45sec of the spinning cursor and another 4 min of blue screen before log-in. I can no longer see any connected FireWire devices (HDs & DVD burner that are OK on other machines) or my EtherNet cable connection. AirPort is still working as is my USB.
I ran DiskUtility both from the HD and the Leopard installer DVD. It does not see any FireWire drives even when running the DVD system.
the original optical drive in my G4 had been dying for a while - it would only respond to "eject" commands if there was a disc in the drive. If I inadvertently closed the drive without a disc, it would refuse to eject. It tried. It made a little motor sound, like it was trying to eject, then it gave up with an even smaller motor sound.
This just started happening within the past month or so. None of my USB drives are being recognized or mounted. They appear within Disk Utilities and I can verify and run checks on them, but they do not mount. This isn't limited to one device or any specific port. It happens with USB memory sticks, external Maxtor drives (two different ones) and now my Canon PowerShot camera. Basically anything the Mac would mount as an external drive has this issue, so I know it's not specific to any hardware.
I do have a work around that I found on [URL] -- If I reboot with the device plugged in and hold the 'command' key the drive gets mounted. Next time I try the device though (in the case of my camera plugging it into another computer) it's not recognized again. I basically have to do this reboot procedure any time I want to use any device.
I recently got a 2008 Macbook air with 10.5.6 installed. It was a floor model.also, the date when i booted it up was before 2001 for some strange reason.anyway, i have a WD 320 gb passport, usb ind. power external. It worked just fine two days ago, but now i upgraded through "Software Update" and..-It does not mount in finder, sidebar, or disc utility. -the power light turns on -cannot force mount with 3rd party software (Mount Me! 2.05) -the MBA will also not mount any SD cards!! I have tried two different cables and even my printer!!-iPod Touch works just fine in the same port-SD cards and WD Passport work fine in anything else
About 90% of the time, SD cards and external hard drives are not mounting as soon as they're connected (via USB or the SD card slot). I need to launch disk utility, and mount volumes manually (disk utility is detecting the devices). This has persisted through multiple 10.7.X updates.
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)?
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.
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?
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 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?
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?
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......................
I just put in a new hard drive in my mac pro and every now and then when i have a issue moving files or cloning the primary drive and back the data up to the new one, I will have an error and the drive will unmount. Is this normal. I am wondering if i can make it more of a permanent mount like the primary drive.
One of the internal drives on my mac pro does not show up at all - most likely, it's dead correct? I used it to store all my itunes movies.. (ATV would connect to the mac pro and the files would play from that drive)
It's a one month old seagate drive, is it normal for it to go bust just for playing media? Can I hook it up to an enclosure and try it out.. disk utility doesn't see the drive.
Luckily I backed up most of it last night.. was going to do the rest tonight.. but ugh, just my luck.
I have a laptop (10.6) I take on trips and a G5 (10.5) desktop that stays at home. I have a folder I keep synched between the two computers. When I get home I use my desktop to log into my laptop, pick the applicable drive and normally the drive icon mounts on my G5 desktop. Accept yesterday when I did this, no desktop icon appeared, however I did get a finder window to appear that represented this shared drive. The problem arose when I tried to synk the two drives using Synk. Even though this drive was supposed to be "mounted", there was no desktop icon for it and Synk could not see it. After fiddling, I was finally able to make an alias of this drive and put it on the desktop, and get Synk to find it, but the situation strikes me as strange. Why is this hard drive not mounting on my desktop like it usually does?
My mother-in-laws Power PC Mac Mini stopped working the other day. After booting to disk utility and seeing that there wasn't a hard drive mounting I assumed the hard drive was dead. I ordered a replacement from OWC, opened the mini, and put in the new hard drive. Now I can't get the mini to boot from CD all I get is a blank gray screen and eventually the folder with a question mark icon. I was under the assumption I could boot to disc again, format and reinstall on the new hard drive. I also can't get the CD to eject but it is spinning up.
My hard drive from my G4 733mhz wont mount at all. The ? in a blue folder just appears. I have tried to start up from an external mountable drive and the ? again appears. When I disconnect the internal hard drive completely and boot from my external drive it boots up.
Prior to this problem I took the hard drive from my G4 733Mhz and put it in my G4 867Mhz computer to load a new disk image. I did this as I didn't have access to an external mountable drive then. After doing this the hard drive doesn't mount in either computer and when connected all other mountable drives wont mount. I have the internal drive set to master.
I bought a brand new 500Gb WD external HDD a couple days ago and it will not mount but it shows up in disc utilities. When I go to disc utilities and try to format it for my mac I get an I/O error right away. So then I give it to my friend who also has a mac and he was able to format to HFS. I get it back and it still does not want to mount. Is there a problem with my mac or is it the HDD? Mac Specs: Power Mac G4 "Quicksilver" 733MHz 1.25Gb RAM running 10.4.11
i downloaded a file on my main computer and wanted to install it on my mac witch should be perfectly easy but when i go to put it on my mac it wont mount to the hard drive
