FW400 vs. FW800

Anyone know the pluses of FW800?
Will installing a fw800 card bypass the computers existing Firewire buss? And, make editing footage from a outboard media drive more reliable (as opposed to a fw400 outboard drive utilizing the computers preconfigured firewire buss?
Thanks
David Healy

A fw800 card with fw400 drives attached will run at fw400 speed. There is no improvement. If your system has both fw400 and fw800 ports, it can run at fw800 speed. Firewire accomodates drives to run at their rated speed.
The value of the card is to create a second bus so if you are running a camera or VTR as well as external (outboard?) drives, the drives can live on one bus and the camera/vtr on the other. This will isolate the demands of the video feed from the demands of the read/write drives. Life will be better, especially if you use Canon equipment.
cheers,
x
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Firewire Problem - But which Interface (FW400 or FW800)?

I'm running 10.4.11 on a Dual 2.5 GHz G5. I've recently started getting errors like the following:
Feb 4 20:45:11 G5 kernel[0]: /SourceCache/AppleFWOHCI/AppleFWOHCI-253.4.1/AppleFWOHCI.cpp 3539: ERROR: FireWire (OHCI) Apple ID 42 built-in: handleUnrecoverableErrorInt
Feb 4 20:45:24 G5 kernel[0]: FireWire (OHCI) Apple ID 42 built-in: 151 bus resets in last minute.
Feb 4 20:48:36 G5 kernel[0]: FireWire (OHCI) Apple ID 42 built-in: 94 bus resets in last minute.
Feb 4 20:51:48 G5 kernel[0]: FireWire (OHCI) Apple ID 42 built-in: 73 bus resets in last minute.
I have numerous hard drives connected to both FW400 and FW800 ports. I also have an EyeTV 500 connected to FW400.
My question is, to shorten the troubleshooting process, does anyone know if this message is specific to the FW400 or the FW800 bus?
For that matter, does this suggest a software issue, or a hardware issue with an external device, or a hardware issue with the FW interface inside the G5?
Any thoughts on a fix would be most appreciated!
Thanks!
-- Jim

Hi-
My question is, to shorten the troubleshooting process, does anyone know if this message is specific to the FW400 or the FW800 bus?
Not sure which port is using the ID 42.
I do know that all ports, FW400 and 800 use the same controller and power supply.
The total power available to the combined firewire ports is 15 watts.
It could very well be that you have an excessive power draw on one of the ports, thus causing the continual reset of the bus.
I have numerous hard drives connected to both FW400 and FW800 ports. I also have an EyeTV 500 connected to FW400.
Of these, how many have their own power supply? If relying mostly on bus power (no external supply) then the power draw could very well be the issue.
As well, daisy chaining can result in oddities and errors due to various external device controller chips.
Rather than daisy chaining, placing a powered hub (repeater) between the tower and the devices can eliminate power and controller conflicts.
For that matter, does this suggest a software issue, or a hardware issue with an external device, or a hardware issue with the FW interface inside the G5?
My initial feeling is that this is due to external hardware factors.
Unfortunately, disconnection of all devices, and adding one at a time is the only way that I know how to troubleshoot.
I've checked all the Developer pages available, and cannot find a document describing the FW port ID assignment.
BTW, I don't care how many makers say that you can daisy chain 62 devices per port. This may be the capability of the FW controller to ID each device, but *does not* address power draw and controller conflict issues.
I have seen too many reports of trouble with daisy chaining, or overloading the FW bus power supply, to believe the marketing hype regarding this matter......

Daisy chain fw400 and fw800 bad?

I have two lacie rugged external hds that I want to connect to my mbp. Both drives have 1 fw400, 1 fw800 and 1 usb2 connection. I was going to daisy chain the drives via fw800 and then connect one of the drives to my mbp via fw400. I was told by a reputable professional that mixing ports when daisy chaining will cause problems and prove to be unreliable. What do you guys think?
Thanks,
Dave

When chaining always have the fastest drive first (closest), otherwise it will run at the slower speed i.e. MBP - Firewire800 - Firewire400

The much debated FW400 and FW800 issue, my final verdict.

Ok, so there has been many conflicting theoretical opinions on how FW400 and FW800 work together on the Macbook Pro's. So I went ahead and conducted some tests with my Triple Interface WD Mybook Pro 500GB and M-Audio Firewire Solo using XBench 1.3
You can see the figures at http://memo.tv/mbp_fwtests.htm. (If I had used a FW800 Stripe set such as the Mybook Pro 1GB the difference in performance would probably be much bigger as the current bottle neck in some of these tests is probably the disk and not the interface).
My results indicate that:
Running the disk on its own in FW800 with no FW audio interface provides by far the best HDD performance
As soon as you connect a FW400 device, the FW800 performance drops to FW400 levels. It does not matter whether the FW400 is daisy chained off the FW800, or connected to a seperate FW400 - the disk always drops to FW400 - and for a £2K 'professional' machine that s*cks big fat donkey b*lls
Even having the disk on its own on FW400, seems better than connecting it on FW800 and having another FW400 device connected (that makes sense I guess).
I had no audio dropouts in any config while the tests were running.
Running iTunes and streaming audio (from radio) while the tests were running had no/minimal impact on test results
USB2 performance for disks are a helluva lot slower than FW400 and should be avoided if any kind of disk performance is needed.
I guess this clears up the myth that if you daisy chain a FW400 device off a FW800, the FW800 works at full bandwidth.
Now of course these are the results that I got. I don't know if I have a healthy mac or not! So I am very eager to find out how other people's mac respond to similar tests... so if you are in doubt, please go and download xbench, try a few different configs, run the Disk Test every time, and lets see the results!
cheers,
MacBook Pro C2D 17" Mac OS X (10.4.9) Week 46 Build

to be fair, not even the desktop macs come with more than one firewire buss built in. many ports, yes. but one buss. so, when you realise that your requirements will outstrip the bandwidth you can get from that one buss, you have to consider your other options. luckily for you, you have a macbook pro, which has a PCexpress card slot. this means you can actually add another _totally independent_ firewire 800 buss, via a card. you'd have to do the same thing on a mac pro tower if you needed it, just with a different kind of card.
I doubt that there are many if any laptops available that come with more than one firewire buss built-in, regardless of how many ports they put on them. so your £2K machine isn't really the ripoff that you are feeling it is.. particularly given that it has this vital expansion capability via the PCexpress slot, which will resolve your firewire issues perfectly via the addition of an inexpensive card.
you can even choose to buy an eSATA card instead of a FW800 one, and use an external drive with an eSATA connector. this will give you even faster disk performance than FW800, and still leave your built-in firewire buss free for your audio interface.
btw, one thing you should know. m-audio are notorious for bad drivers. it's quite common for users of other firewire audio interfaces (like RME for example) to have far less, or even no drop out issues at all in sharing a drive and the interface on the one buss. it's possible that it's just your m-audio device that refuses to make any effort to share the buss bandwidth with your drive. and it's also possible that your western digital drive is not a good player on mac firewire either. I recall reading somewhere about WD drives having some issues or less than optimal performance on macs.
in any case, the suggestion of using an inexpensive card to add another high speed buss to your machine will work regardless of what your devices are and how bad or good their firewire use is, cos they'll then have their own uninterrupted buss.

Using FW400 and FW800 devices simultaneously

I noticed that as I am using my external FW400 iSight camera that Time Machine suspends backups on my FW800 G-Drive. Is the FW800 logic sharing logic resources with FW400?

There's only a single Firewire Bus ... when connecting two devices of different speeds always connect the fastest to the MBP first then the slower one into that i.e. put the fastest link in the chain first or all devices will operate at the slower speed.

FW400 and FW800

Hi.
Okay, so recently I got a FW400 PCMCIA card to give me a dedicated buss for running FW400 devices off of, so that I could utilise the full potential of my FW800 external hard drive on the internal buss.
But, I've noticed that, when the FW400 PCMCIA card is connected, the connection speed on my FW800 internal buss drops down to FW400 (I am checking this via the System Profiler).
I am stumped, since as far as I know, this shouldn't happen, since both busses should be independent of each other.
As soon as I power down and remove the PCMCIA card, the internal buss speed goes back up to FW800.
Does anybody have any ideas why this is happening?
Thanks,
onlyone-jc.

Yes, you'll find that here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=442212&tstart=30
It has been archived for some reason, thus no more posts can be added to it, otherwise I would have posted there instead. It seems no resolution was found either, so maybe somebody can post a resolution up in here?
Both busses (the Powerbook's internal FireWire buss, and the FireWire buss provided by the PCMCIA card) should remain independent, and thus allow the internal buss to remain open at 800Mbps transfer speeds. But, that doesn't seem to be the case here?
The only way that a FW400 device should prioritise itself over a FW800 device, would be if they were both connected to the Powerbook ports, in which are both connected to the same FireWire buss, thus meaning that they are not able to act independently of each other.
As was said in the linked thread, surely there's a way to prioritise either buss, or something similar?
Can anybody help? Are there any official Apple technicians around here? Or, somebody with the right know-how?
Thanks,
onlyone-jc.

Mixing HDs with FW400 and FW800 in a daisy chain

I have a 360GB with two FW ports and two Quadra D2s with one FW400 and two FW800 ports. Using the three HDs -
Can I Connect FW400 to FW400 then out via FW800 into FW800 then out via FW400 into my eMac?

So it would seem that no matter how the two FW types are threaded between the three HDs the route is open and the chain runs at the 'slower' speed..
As I have yet to format one of the Quadra's can I put it into the chain and then Format it, or should it be formatted with the orher two HDs diconnected from the chain?
Cheers

Using iMovie6 with projects on external FW400 and FW800 drives ...SLOW!

Shouldn't iMovie6 work smoothly with movie projects stored on external Firewire 400 or 800 hard-drives?____ ...or am I expecting too much?!!
With the FW400 drive, the performance I'm experiencing is unacceptable. It's excruciatingly slow (even simply mouse/slider movements take forever) and the playback is so choppy, it's useless. (this is after converting an iMovie3 project to iMovie6 -- could this be a factor too?__)
Those on FW800 seem to work better (as they should) but even though the audio seems OK, the video playback is very jerky and it still takes a few seconds for it to respond to any mouse action.
Is FW400 simply too slow for iMovie?____
I presume USB2.0 would be just as bad.

Is FW400 simply too slow for iMovie?
Both types of FireWire drives should work fine. I'd look for another cause.
If your camcorder is a Canon, search the forum for how to avoid FireWire conflicts.
Otherwise, perhaps there's a clue here:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=1852869#1852869
Try resetting your FireWire ports? Disconnect all FireWire devices, do a Shut Down, disconnect your Mac's power cord from the wall outlet, wait 15 minutes, then reboot.
Karl

Logic board swap fw400 to fw800

My 867Dual died and all indications seemed to point to the logic board.
So I swapped the cpu into a FW800 1ghz (shell from parted psu) because they share the same 133 bus.
It works and I haven't had anything strange happen
Anyone else do this?
Now I can use the newer wireless card.
I also want to try this with my main unit a dual 1mhz mdd fw400.
Any reason not to be doing this?

Running fine, and I found out it was the AGP card that failed causing the no start.
Anyways, I have a dual 867FW800 waiting for an airport card

Possible to swap MDD FW400 for FW800 logic board?

Hello all,
I'd thought I would ask this question because I have been thinking about this. Currently, have a dual 1.25 2003 model(not earlier MDD!) MDD G4 with the 2MB L3 per processor.
I just received today my airport extreme USB netgear device and I must say plugged into the USB 2.0 5-port card I have it is even faster than the Belkin PCI F5D7000 card! But, my question is concerning something else.
FW800 logic board - is it really worth it for me to swap current FW400 board with the FW800 board? 2ndly, can I use my existing MDD case or do I have to find another case? My power supply is a 360w power supply. I am not sure if it is a quieter one or not. The date on my power mac G4 2003 says: copyright June 2003(or was it July?) Apple computer. - Does this entail that the FW800 machines came out the same time as mine did? Again, I don't have the original MDD(867,1gh,1.25), I have the last dual bootable OS 9.2.2 MDD machine from 2003.
Also, is the airport extreme card going to produce faster results that the netgear WG111V2.0 USB device I currently have plugged into my USB 2.0 pci card? One thing I did notice is that I can no longer put my computer into hibernation or deep sleep, since I now have the USB 2.0 netgear wireless device attached.
Can anyone confirm if there is a way around for the sleep/hibernate function to work even with the USB 2.0 device plugged in? I also removed the Belkin wireless PCI card(FD57000). Before the USB 2.0 device, my computer would goto sleep and hibernate normally.
Thanks!

*9.x and Internet*: shouldn't be a problem with Ethernet. Forget which control panels you'll need to play with TCP/IP, Network? So if you want faster Internet with the MDD in 9.x, go with Ethernet -- the regular Airport card will work in 9.x by the way. That's the reason why for faster wireless, I'm going to buy the new Airport Express (with wireless -n), and connect via WDS to my Airport Extreme -- the MDD will connect to the Express via Ethernet which should be fine in both 9.x and OS X.
I did this once before my the original Airport Express (wireless -g) and an old Linksys all-in-one that supported WDS. But the Linksys blew its ethernet ports, so I replaced it with a newer model that doesn't support WDS.
*Copper heatsink* should fit any MDD CPU card, I've tried mine on both a Dual 867 and 1.25GHz cards, although I'm using a Verax cooler on the 1.25GHz Dual. The copper contact plate while narrow (about 1.5 cm) is a long piece, so it would contact both single and dual CPUs. As for the 1.25GHz dual in particular, see here.
Just a tip, use some good thermal compound, like Artic Silver. You'll need to clean off the old compound on your CPUs. I used Articlean (also made by Artic silver), works great. They sell a kit with both cleaner and purifier (preparation compound for the thermal compounds).
*Dual 1.25 2003*. I think the best way may be to check the model number. According to everymac.com, it should be M9145LL/A. I'm sure the info's also on Apple's site somewhere. The last 2003 1.25Ghz have 2MB L3 cache, which is easy enough to see in say System Profiler. If you're seeing 2MB L3, then you know you've got the CPU from the last 2003 model. As for the motherboard, you'd probably have to check the assembly number under the modem to insure a 2003 motherboard, but I don't think that matters as much as the CPU.
The CPU cards from MDDs and G4 XServes are pretty much interchangable --setting aside the issue of 133MHz and 167Mhz front side buses, which could overclock or underclock depending on CPU card & motherboard combination. And reading around there's an incompatibility with certain MDD Dual 1.0GHz on certain motherboards.
You could put an early 1.25GHz dual with only 1MB L3 on a 2003 MDD motherboard; for that matter you could stick a 1.42GHz dual from a FW800 MDD on your 2003 MDD motherboard, which some people have done. I guess if you're seeing Dual 1.25GHz w/1MB L3 advertised as the last 2003 MDDs, then people might not know what they're talking about, or may have replaced the CPU. The 1MB L3 versions cost less.
FW800, indeed if you want it, you can always add a card later. Since the MDDs don't have USB2, for that you'll need a card as I think you've already done. But there's always a worry of eating the slots. While rare, there are some combo USB2/FW800 cards. Problem with a combo cards over separate cards is that there's usually a performance hit on the FW side. A friend of mine has one that suffers from this -- like 7-10MB/sec hit. I recently bought a Siig combo FW800/USB2 and there's not nearly the performance hit; FW800 is only a few ticks less in MB/sec compared to my FW800 only card. In my DA, I didn't see any deep sleep issues with the Siig card, but every Mac is different. I've haven't tested it in a MDD, yet.
I'm working on getting two MDDs working (long story), so I have my hands full. Can't say I love the MDDs yet, but I certainly been bit by the tinkering/upgrading bug. So I'm have fun getting my two MDDs together that are both very close to being ready -- I need to stress test them before moving over my HDs/data, cards, etc.

FW400? FW800? Nah.. Try FW3200 for speed...

4 times FW800 speed, with the same cabling and connectors.. Nice... maybe soon enough we won't have to worry about FW bottlenecks...
More info:
http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsid=5783

Geez,..... I think about what was going on 20 years ago.. what we have now, and what we will get in maybe a year or two.... scares the pooey outta me...! but it sounds exciting...!

Connecting FW400 disconnects FW800 device

I bought a 2 bay FW 800 drive box which uses the Oxford 924dsb which is a highly regarded chipset from what I have read. I use one drive for Time Machine, the other was to be for video capture.
I have captured from my FW 400 DV camcorder successfully to the internal drive.
If I connect the camcorder to the FW 400 port (on either the drive box or the iMac) it disconnects my FW 800 drives AND the camcorder won't show as available.
Is there a problem using the these firewire buses at the same time?
I can capture to the internal and then transfer iMovie 09 events to the external later, but that isn't really what I wanted to do.
Thanks,
Jeremy

I believe the two ports share the same total available power. I was thinking about the fact that the hard drive may supply power to its daisy-chain port. But since a hard drive is NOT a hub, and a hub is more than just wired connections (it acts as a distributor and a repeater), maybe the daisy-chain makes total connection length too long and/or does not supply additional power. I'm not sure... I guess you can test the power part by turning on the drive while it is disconnected from the iMac and attaching the camcorder (to the daisy-chain port) to see if it receives power (but maybe the drive is smart enough to not turn on if there is no live connection to the iMac).
The FireWire hub would be a good thing to have. I have one because I have a video camera and an iPod that I attach and detach often, and I don't want to wear out the port in the iMac. And FireWire ports have been known to fry (it happened to me once with a Power Mac G5), so I'd rather risk the hub with hot-swapping instead of the iMac's direct port. The other port is always connected to a FireWire drive, and if I ever need to remove that direct connection (or the other connection to the hub), I power off the iMac and then remove it.

FW800 external HD and FW400 interface --- problems?

has anyone had problems using a firewire based interface (like the presonus firebox, what im using) and an external HD using firewire 800 (g-tech's g-drive Q is what I'm using)?
This just happened. Turning on the HD causes tiny clicks/pops from the interface output, only briefly. the cloff falls out of sync for a sec. any app playing back video or audio suddenly wont play audio anymore (nothing comes out the speakers). Both are connected to the firewire ports on the back of my G5.
turning on my FW800 external HD effectively kills my interface. i have to restart the computer or turn the interface off and on again to get it going.
why is this happening? this is hugely frustrating. I only intended to use the external as backup for files and projects, but if I'd wanted to use it to stream samples I'd be mighty screwed...
...what gives? I'll probobly call presonus tomorrow and ask about it, but I thought I'd try here and see if anyone experienced similar issues. can I not use fw400 and fw800 simultaneously? is it because they share a common bus, and then suddenly theres a conflict?
thanks in advance
chris

I can only relate to you my good experience using a FF400 on the 400 port and a LaCie HD on the 800. Never a glitch, despite my macbook's architecture sporting only one firewire buss !
In theory, you should be able to use both at at once.
ps. i can even use the FF400 on bus power, with the 800 HD churning away quite happily.

S.M.A.R.T. FW400 bridge boards vs FW800 bridge boards

I am building a 4 bay case with ATA drives for storage. It will be connected via with FW400 or FW800. I see the FW400 bridgeboards are available as S.M.A.R.T., just like the drive in my computr. I do not see any FW800 S.M.A.R.T. available. How inportant are drives to have S.M.A.R.T.?

SMART is not critical to anything. It's merely a technology that enables a hard drive to detect possible failure of the drive before the drive actually fails. However, it's up to the manufacturer of the drive to provide the information used by SMART. Some manufacturers provide more information on the drive than others. Drives with SMART technology can still fail without warning, and SMART is statistically no more than about 50 percent reliable at detecting impending failure.
Do a Google search on it and you'll find hundreds of articles about SMART, what it is, how it works, etc.

Audio Distortion on FW400 Audio Interface Daisy Chained to FW800 Hard Drive

Hi everyone! I’m an experienced Mac user in need of help resolving FireWire device issues.
I received my 27” i7 iMac a couple of weeks ago running 10.6.2. After a long process of migrating over from my 9+ year old Dual 500 MHz G4 PowerMac tower, I was excited to set up two 1TB drives inside an OWC Mercury Elite Quad-Interface Dual HD enclosure via FW800. I then daisy chained my Focusrite Saffire 10 audio interface (FW400) to the HD enclosure via a FW800 to FW400 converter cable. To reiterate:
i7 iMac (FW800 port) --> OWC Mercury Pro Quad-Interface Dual HD Case with 2X 1TB drives (FW800) --> Focusrite Saffire 10 audio interface (FW400)
Although a lot of people may disagree, I wasn’t concerned about having my FW800 hard drives drop down to FW400 speeds because of the slower audio interface. I have read enough about the 1394 FW protocol and its ability to use something called beta clouds, allowing both FW400 and FW800 daisy chained devices to operate at their maximum speeds. So far, so good. The drives are reading/writing data fast.
As many studio audiophiles have said, you should separate your audio recordings and projects from your startup disk. I’ve done so. However, call me naïve, but I did not imagine that every time my external drives read or wrote data, my audio interface would go into a state of distortion (like raising the gain on a track as high as it can go). When the activity of the disk drops below a certain level, the audio interface usually switches back to clean pristine audio. I am experiencing this within a studio environment and with simple CoreAudio iTunes playback via my audio interface. How is this possible? Am I doing something wrong or is there a blatant limitation with the FW chipset Apple is using for their single bus in the new iMacs? If anyone can provide me with a solution or a convenient work around, I will be very grateful!

Thank you for the feedback, Rick. To shed some light on daisy chaining FW800 with FW400 devices, I provide the following quote from one FireWire technical article I came across on the web:
+"The concept of beta clouds allows FireWire to keep all devices on the bus to operating at their maximum speeds. Devices are cluster together on a logical level in a cloud. The cloud operates as a single block at 800 Mb/sec. The borders of these clouds are where legacy devices are connected, operating normally. Each device operates at its highest speed."+
In short, beta clouds allow both devices to operate at their highest speeds.
Both the audio interface and the external hard drive enclosure has its own, connected power source.
I wish I had the option to use USB2 with my audio interface, but it only has a FW400 connection.

FW400 vs. FW800

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