firewire 800

[ivesetsail]

I have a 15 inch powerbook 1.25ghz, 2GB RAM g4. Are there any compatibility issues with using a firewire 800 drive? Does glyph make a rack mountable version of a firewire 800 drive? And are there any issues running an 800-400 converter cord from the firewire 800 port into a firewire 400 drive that people know of? What would you all suggest for the best performance?

Thanks...

[ivesetsail]

oh yeah, i'm using a 002. anyone?

[Stage]

I just found this on the apple site... news about firewire 800

petr

[jmp]

That announcement addresses incompatibilities between the Oxford 922 chip, used in most FW800 drives, and Apple's new 10.3 "Panther" software. Since PTLE doesn't work under Panther, it should not be of concern. I am using a Lacie FW800 "Big Disk" under 10.2.8 and have had no problems whatsoever.

Most FW800 drive manufacturers have and will continue to post firmware upgrades for their drives in the next few days. It would be an excellent idea to made sure you have a drive with the latest firmware installed before going to 10.3 and the next version of PTLE in a couple of weeks or so.

The reason I say this, is that most of the announcements for patch installation I've seen say they have to be installed under 10.2.8 or lower. In the case of LaCie, they presently only have a patch which can be installed under OS9 (not classic), but promise to have an OSX installable patch "as soon as possible". So be sure your drive is updated BEFORE you go to 10.3, or do what I did: Install a second bootable system using Carbon Copy Cloner. I'm enjoying the increased speed and GUI benefits of 10.3 for Photoshop, FCP4, and my other graphics programs, and then I reboot to 10.2.8 when I need to work with PTLE.