Hot-Plugging Mbox Question

[gypsyfingers]

Hi all,

I'm a father of two young girls, a full-time musician/composer and a NYC resident, which is to say:

1. I have to grab a quick 10-20 minutes of work when I can
2. My laptop is what I use for everything, email, web, recording, etc.

So what I have been doing (unwisely, as I understand it) is just hot-plugging my external firewire and Mbox 2 whenever I have a few moments, and then unmounting the drive and unplugging when done. This has resulted in a lot of kernel panics, which I have been able to more or less tame by not closing any applications once opened, and by doing hard shut downs of my computer every few days. Otherwise no damage yet...that I know of.

Being that there is really no reasonable way to shut down/start up every time I record/edit anything in PT, is there anything I can do to minimize the risk to my computer/external/Mbox? Should I try to leave everything plugged in all the time? (I have a vague memory of this causing problems for my external, and of course it's pretty wasteful power-wise...)

Also, if anybody could give me an impression of how dangerous to the Mbox and the external drive the hot-plugging is, that'd be great too.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


The stats:
MBP, 2.53, 4 gigs RAM, 10.7.8
Mbox 2 (LE, 7.4)
Bus-powered external FW drive, 800 to 400 connection

[gypsyfingers]

Btw, I noticed in a related thread that some people put their machines to sleep before plugging in...does that negate/protect the FW-external and USB-Mbox hot- plugging at all?

Thanks again for input.

[DigiTechSupt]

Should I try to leave everything plugged in all the time? (I have a vague memory of this causing problems for my external, and of course it's pretty wasteful power-wise...)

Hot plugging is definitely the problem and the cause of the kernel panics. I would recommend keeping both the drive and the Mbox plugged in. Hot plugging USB is typically ok if the device supports it (the Mbox doesn't, obviously), but hot plugging Firewire is dangerous and you risk a high chance of blowing the firewire chip in the computer and/or the drive.

You can connect/disconnect the drive to conserve power as long as the drive is not mounted on the desktop. The Mbox has very low power consumption and wouldn't add significantly to any draw.

And lastly - sleep does not negate any of this.

[gypsyfingers]

Thank you so much for the response, and for the recommendation. You mention that the FW chipsets can be damaged on the computer and drive if I do any hot-plugging, but then you say:

"You can connect/disconnect the drive to conserve power as long as the drive is not mounted on the desktop. The Mbox has very low power consumption and wouldn't add significantly to any draw."

Are you saying that I can mount/unmount the FW drive and then unplug it as long as the drive is powered down before I plug, even to a powered-on computer?? Because I pretty much thought of that as hot-plugging!

Clarification would be appreciated, if at all possible.

Also if you were able to go into any damage I would do to the Mbox by plugging/unplugging, I would be grateful. It's clear that this destabilizes the OS, but other than that is there any burnout possibility, as there evidently can be with FW drives?

.

[gypsyfingers]

Bumping...