Crashes with external drives (power management problem?)

Everything worked well in Tiger on my first gen MBP. Since i switched to Leopard and now Snow, and a new UNI MBP in december 08 I have so many external drive issues.
USB drives just disappear and power off (from the system not electrical) for no reason, mostly when connected to USB hubs. I've tried various hubs including the powered ones. But as soon as i go over two USB devices in the provided ports my problems start.. It feels like not enough juice is getting through those ports on my MBP. I never have a problem if i just connect 2 devices into the MBP, but it's not enough (i have 5x1tb external drives).
Also the same with the express34 slot.. Everything was fine under Tiger and my old MBP, But now i get the grey wall of death so many times when connecting 2x esata 1TB drives. The system is so unstable with multiple drives both USB and. I'm currently working as a pro Photographer on assignment in Asia and these stability are starting to become a big problem.
God forbid i'm even considering a switch back to windows for reliability, (yes, i did use the words windows and reliability in the same sentence)
Does anybody else experience problems with multiple drives through leopard/snow leopard via Apple notebooks? I would love to hear some users experiences and hopefully find a solution to my problem.. In every other way the system works like a charm.
I will post in 2 forums because i'm not sure if software or hardware related.
Thanks, any help is appreciated.

It can't be the drives because they get swapped monthly when i hand them in.. Varies brands and external boxes but always 1TB drives.. I have tried 2 different powered hubs and still experience the same problems, however those were generic ones i picked up in Asia (all made in Taiwan right? (rhetorical:))
Ok, maybe for a last try i will purchase a branded hub and see if that helps. I still can't get the thought out of my head that it's a power problem in the MBP logic board, is it possible? I say this because the esata drives behave in a similar fashion via the expresscard.

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I've got a MacBook Pro 13.3" that's a little over a month old, with a LaCie 1TB LaCie d2 Quadra with USB 3.0, #301542U and I'm suffering the same problems and a few others with it. I've got a partition on it set up as my Time Machine backup drive. I've turned off the Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible in the Energy Saver preferences but I'm still having the sleep problem with it. According to the LaCie Manual:
By default, your drive will enter Eco Mode after 30 minutes of inactivity in order to conserve energy. To exit Eco Mode, simply access data on the drive and the disk will automatically restart. You can manage this feature using LaCie Desktop Manager. Click the Eco tab.
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Hi All,
I have a problem with my Lacie External HD, i know it's not an Apple product but it is used with my Apple machines and formatted for Apple OS. Also the folks here are very knowledgeable.
I have a Lacie D2 Triple Interface http://salestores.com/stores/images/images_747/301146U.jpg
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cheers

First thing to try is see if LaCie will replace the power brick, and that is what most people mean by "power supply" issues.
The other is how LaCie products tend to disrupt FW ports and cause problems, which is something that they are also prone to, should not, and don't find with others.
There use to be more attention to hot-swapping FW cable and Isolate brand or feature to prevent a FW port or device from being 'fried' by hot-swapping or plugging in a hot cable.
I'd move my drives to either another Firewire product, or more to native SATA.
http://www.macsales.com/firewire/
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Thanks very much for your reply.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a solution because the article refers to whom have configured the drive with included software and drivers that came with the drive.
This is not my case, I never used any third party soft ...only OS X disk utility ...
best
marco

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Raja,
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LennyL wrote:
Hi,
everybody suggests "hdparm -B 254 /dev/sdxxxx". This does NOT work. At all. The Load Cycle Count keeps going up. The 2nd HDD (in the CD/hdd caddy) powers down every few seconds, then up again.
I found this works: "hdparm -S 25 /dev/sdxxxxx" (change sdXXX in sda, sdb, or whatever relevant to your case). It sets spindown every 25*5 seconds. Second hdd is practically always on and LoadCycleCount remains constant.
I am also using "hdparam -S 0" to disable drive power management entirely.
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Please Please can you check something for me?
I have two hard drives (second is in aftermarket caddy), but it seems the second hd (the one in the caddy) is NOT seen by BIOS at boot. So I can only boot from the internal hdd. After booting, the second hdd is seen by Linux, SATA link reports 3Gb, no issues, all is fine.
Same here, the secondary hard drive is not seen in BIOS or in the BIOS boot menu.
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UPDATE: Even in good ol' DOS, the drive is seen. (I just booted DOS for a firmware update of an SSD drive, which was installed in the hard drive caddy.)
Where did you get the BIOS v1.32? The latest on the Lenovo Website and in System Update is 1.20..
Can you verify something for me too?
On my L520, Turbo Mode does not work at all, how about yours?
You can verify under Windows using hwinfo (http://www.hwinfo.com/ ).
For Linux, there's http://code.google.com/p/i7z/ , but you'll have to compile it.
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Hi,
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SlashSupport
A couple of weeks ago I installed quite a few of the
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[email protected]

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Hi,
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Regards,
Dharani
SlashSupport
A couple of weeks ago I installed quite a few of the
patches in the recommended list.
Since then, I get the following message repeated
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power.config file and in the startup scripts, but
couldn't find any reference to "DPMSSet." Any ideas on
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To pin point whether or not IRQs conflicts is to be blamed, please kindly post your IRQs conflicts for us to verify.
A signature of your system setup will proves greater help for others to advice you with more accurate directions and benefits you in the future.
Please read this Moan Guide too.

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Hi,
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I figured it out.

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My iMac, 1.8 GHz, OS 10.5.8, PPC's internal hard drive is failing. Rather than replace the internal drive, I had hoped to use an external USB drive to run the OS.
When using the OS 10.5.x install, I am repeatedly told the OS cannot be installed onto my external drive.
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Is it because it is a USB drive?
Is it the format of the drive? It is currently formatted as "Mac OS X Extended Journaled."
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You need an external Firewire drive to boot a PowerPC Mac computer.
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help!

Is it only Lacie drives you've had trouble with, or is it other brands as well?
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2010075&tstart=0
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Problems booting with external drive

Hello,
I just upgraded from an older model MacBook Pro that was happily running OS X (10.5.4) to a 2009 model that is currently running 10.5.7. There was a gap of a few months between models, though, so I cloned the old one onto an external drive and used it to boot an iMac loaner -all without any problems. My problem is that now that I have the new MacBook Pro , when I hold the option key while starting the computer in order to select the external drive, the computer reverts to the internal hard drive rather than booting from my external drive.
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If I understand your post correctly, I think the reason the new MBP won't boot from the external drive is that the OS that's on the external drive is incompatible with the new MBP. What I would try in that situation is to connect the external drive to the new computer, and then use the new computer's OS X install disk to install the operating system onto the external drive. It should then boot (though why you want to boot from the external drive is not something you explained).

Managing iTunes with external drive

I just recently moved my iTunes music folder to an external drive. It's working beautifully.
It's easy enough to make sure that I have the external drive attached when listening to or importing new music from CD's. However, if I have my iTunes constantly open so that it downloads new podcasts, can I do so without always having the external plugged in and then "consolidate library" to add newly downloaded podcasts to the external?
Not sure if that makes sense, so let me clarify how I THINK this would work. If my external is plugged in, it will automatically place new podcasts in the music folder on the external. However, what happens if it downloads (or attempts to download) a podcast when the external is not plugged in (but iTunes is running)? Does it then place the podcasts on the internal drive until I later plug in the external? Then I would just have to "consolidate library" to move the newly added to the default external drive?
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I just do this manually because I'll end up deleting the content from the internal library anyways. You might want to check if consolidate merges content from your internal library /volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/you/Music/iTunes/ to your external library if the external library is selected when you launch iTunes. If that works, then you should be fine; however you would probably want or need to delete the files from your internal anyways. I've always considered consolidate to be a method of bringing referenced files into the library (you have songs that you imported without having the add to library checkbox selected).
I have been using an external on a machine hooked up to my HDTV for a couple of years and sometimes I need to sync items to that system from the internal or another machine (network). I just keep that library on the external selected and either transfer purchases or copy over a podcast (if I'm using sneaker net) and double click it.
For example, if I subscribe to something like GROOVELECTRIC, download a podcast, then simply double-click the actual file, it is added into my podcast directory on the external and placed in the correct location in the podcast tree.
So, if consolidate doesn't do the trick you can try just selecting the files in your library and launching them to have them copied to your external or you can try using the Add to Library function from the file menu. Figuring out a way to delete the files from the internal after merging/importing/consolidating seems to be the last piece I need to work on.
I haven't revisited this for a while, but I'd like to hear about any trick you come up with.
You will still need your internal library set up to mirror the podcast subscriptions you have on the external, so a full deletion of that library does not seem to be the solution.
Good Luck,
-j

Crashes with external drives (power management problem?)

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