Care and feeding of firewire hard drives

What are people doing to support their firewire hard drives?
Sure firewire is plug and play
but with hard drives if you do not shut down
its plug and pay.
In my case, my computer freezes once a month
for whatever reason
and I have to power it down.
This my firewire HD does not like.
I have not had much success with my HD
(it just got back from the shop)
So do people keep a diskwarrior cd in the slot
to resurrect the volume when it refuses to mount
and wants to be initialized?
How do you keep your firewire HD up and running?
and does diskwarrior cure all disk description ills?

Hi Pat:
Never thought of it as care and feeding.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my entire HDD to my LaCie FW HDD. It is set up as a boot drive in CCC so I can boot from it if I need to.
I also use Tech Tool Pro regularly. Actually, since I use CCC to do incremental backups TTP is on both HDDs, so I can boot from one HDD and work on the other and vice-versa. Quite a neat arrangement, actually.
I have my LaCie partitioned so that I have my internal HDD on one partition, Previous OS on another and I have my Pismo running Tiger on a third, and a large 4th partition which I recently used to backup my son-in-law's entire iBook HDD as I completely reformatted and re-installed Tiger.
When I am not actively using the LaCie, if I remember, I eject it from the Finder window, and shut it down, so it is not running continuously.
That's enough for now.
Post back with comments or questions.
cornelius
PB G3 Pismo400, 100 GB 5400 Toshiba internal, 1 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.3.9) Beige G3 OS 8.6

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Fire hubs and disk drives. FireWire hubs are notorious for introducing errors and instability onto the bus.
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http://www.softraid.com
http://www.softraid.com/demo.html - manual and demo
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Password:
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Photon2:
Yes, you can set up your external firewire HDD as an emergency boot drive.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Your HDD must be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2. (Optional) I suggest you partition your HDD so that the first partition is roughly equivalent to the size of your internal HDD. The rest can be partitioned for other uses. (See Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery) For step-by-step for formatting and partitioning please post back).
3. Use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your internal HDD to the external firewire HDD/partition.
Please post back with further questions or comments.
Cheers
cornelius

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Hello
I have a LaCie External Firewire Hard Drive (like this one (http://www.lacie.com/us/support/support_manifest.htm?id=10105). Since it uses a fireware 400 cable, I bought a FireWire 800-400 adapter, the one from moshi that is sold in the mac store.
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Hi, oops, I have more than 1 mac & I apologize for assuming you are a multiple mac owner..
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