Buffalo firewire drives crash Westmere

[Postman]

I bought 2 1.5 tbyte drives for sound effects storage a few months ago. They work great on my G5. Either of them cause an instant black curtain of death when attached to this new Westmere 6 core. It makes no difference if they are connected directly or through another drive. A quick google shows others are having the same problem.

Anyone here have trouble or a solution?

Which Oxford chipset does the drive use? Can you post a link to the drive specs?

[Postman]

I do not know which chipset, doesn't seem to be advertised. I only know they say it is compatible 10.4 and later.
http://www.buffalotech.com/files/products/HD-HSQ_DS.pdf

I have HD-HS1.5Q (or HD-HS1.5.TQ, same thing). When/if I hear back from Buffalo with news, I'll be back!

[Craig F]

I don't think that Buffalo spends the money for Oxford chips

[drenkrom]

Do you have any other FW device plugged in when you try this? If so, try removing them to eliminate the possibility of a conflict on the FW buss.

If the problem persists, the next thing I'd try is to mount the drive on the G5 and reboot the G5 in FW Target mode (hold T while booting) and connecting it to your MacPro with a FW cable. The external drive should mount in target mode along with the internal drives of the G5. You can then run a disk check in Disk Utilities and/or a DiskWarrior on the drive from within the MacPro. It sound like the issue could be some header or directory weirdness.

Also, what partition map does the drive use?

IHTH

[Postman]

It appears to be a 64 bit incompatibility, I just discovered. A temporary fix is to boot Snow Leopard into 32 bit mode. (Hold 3 and 2 during boot until the apple logo appears or use a terminal command to change the default setting.) Older MacPro's boot into 32 bit mode by default, the newest models are set to boot into 64 bit mode by default.

Apple Partition Map. No other firewire devices, it does not matter which port is used.

I'm hoping to hear from Buffalo before the drives warranties expire in May.

[bad jitter]

Uh, I think Buffalos are the cheapest drives you can buy. I have avoided them for just that reason. Good luck!

[sunburst79]

When the warranty expires pull the HDD's out. Put them in OWC DIY enclosures and don't look back.

[Postman]

Yeah, well, I hoped they'd be good enough for sound effects storage (a master and a backup). I almost got away with it too, they've been working very well since last year. "Missed it by THAT much."

[Postman]

Good suggestion Hobo.