"Firewire drives disappear" problem. Pulling my hair out...

[Florian]

Hi
i've been searching for a remedy for this and cant make seem to make sense of it. does anyone have the same problem? it happens on all the newer (last year's) LaCie and G-Drives, 1TB and 2TB etc...

The attached Firewire (FW800) drives just suddenly don't respond anymore. they dont really dismount, the icon is still on desktop but all of a sudden protools cant auto backup anymore and displays errors..

Sometimes the light on the hardrive goes out. sometimes not.

Mac Pro 2.4QuadCore Xeon, OSX 10.6.8, Protools 9.06

This happens on different machines, sometimes every 10 minutes, sometimes 2x a day. It happens right in the middle of a session playing.

OF course energy saver/system preferences are set to never sleep etc.

Lacie doesnt seem to have a fix and GDrive either.

I am aware of manufacturers using "green drives" that do spin down, but i was under impression that Gdrive and lacie do not.

Anyone? i am testing disksomnia (http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/disksomnia)right now to see if that helps...

[groundcontrol]

This looks like the symptoms of "Green" drives.

You can't use those drives for recording since they'll go in sleep mode after a certain time being unaccessed due to their proprietary built-in power management circuit which will cause errors with PT.

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by groundcontrol

This looks like the symptoms of "Green" drives.

You can't use those drives for recording since they'll go in sleep mode after a certain time being unaccessed due to their proprietary built-in power management circuit which will cause errors with PT.

I agree.

[Rich Breen]

Originally Posted by Florian

...
This happens on different machines, sometimes every 10 minutes, sometimes 2x a day. It happens right in the middle of a session playing.

OF course energy saver/system preferences are set to never sleep etc.

Lacie doesnt seem to have a fix and GDrive either.

I am aware of manufacturers using "green drives" that do spin down, but i was under impression that Gdrive and lacie do not....

See this thread: http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=333806

I haven't found a reliable way to tell which drives are safe and which are not yet, but the G-Drives have been trouble...

best,
rich

[Florian]

thanks for your replies. i did read the other thread.
however, to clarify:

i tend to think its NOT "green drive related" since the drives go missing even in the middle of being written to or being read from.
i was posting to see if anyone sees this behavior.

the weird thing is that it follows these drives around on different systems, cables, power supplies.

i first saw it with new lacie drives, which i have used dozens of before and never had problems. then i went with G-drives and it is the same behavior.

[Richard Barrie]

We have also seen this (and it can be quite catastrophic when it happens - we even took to removing drives from cases and mounting them internally while working and then putting the drives back in their cases when finished).

Anyway, we even went down to LaCie in London to try to show them the problem.

What we have come up with so far, but have not been absolutely able to confirm this in use yet, is that the command issued by a computer to an external drive to tell it to go to sleep is done by removing the power rail from the firewire cable even although the external drive is powered by its own PSU.

It appears that some, but not all, MacPros will 'glitch' this power from time to time and the external drive will go to sleep but still show the icon on the desktop etc. and can do this mid take.

It is possible to show the exact symptoms by very quickly (sub 5 seconds) unplugging then replugging the firewire cable. Doing it very quickly means that the OS will not generate a "drive removed without unmounting" error message.

We have also shown that third party PCIe firewire cards will not cause the drive problems, so we think it is a function of the firewire ports on the Mac(s) itself.

We have not been able to definitely able to prove this yet, but have now modified a firewire cable so that we can put a storage scope on to monitor the power line, but this is not something we can do on a 'real' session as clients would become a bit twitchy.

Our current working practice is not to use built in Firewire ports and either use USB3 or Firewire 800 expansion cards.

[Rich Breen]

Originally Posted by Richard Barrie

...the command issued by a computer to an external drive to tell it to go to sleep is done by removing the power rail from the firewire cable even although the external drive is powered by its own PSU.

It appears that some, but not all, MacPros will 'glitch' this power from time to time and the external drive will go to sleep but still show the icon on the desktop etc. and can do this mid take...

How does this explain that only some (a very few in my experience) external drives display this problem? It appears that these 'troublesome' drives behave this way on all Macs, and yet the majority of external drives work just fine.

Thoughts?

best,
rich

[Richard Barrie]

The nature of the problem is that it is very inconsistent and extremely intermittent.
We have seen it happen with several different manufacturer's drives and on different computers. It seems to be associated with the latest generation of drives. We use a lot of LaCies and so have most information about these. It only seems to happen with the current Quadra USB3 variations.
Most manufacturers seem to use the same Oxford chipset.
We have tried firmware upgrades as supplied to us by LaCie but to no avail. It is not related to the ECO/Green modes even although that is what we initially thought. We have never been able to reproduce the problem in the workshop or "off session". We have had the situation where it will happen several times early on in a session, but then using the same drives we won't have a further problem on sessions lasting several weeks (but we suspect that this might be because the drives have been moved on the expansion card ports instead of using the built in ports).
We cannot say definitively that it will only happen with some drives out of a batch, but not others (we get through an awful lot of drives).