Help with external hard drive and firewire?

2 questions:  1) Does anyone know if there is a hub made for the firewire 800 to allow more than 1 device to be hooked up at 1 time? ex... capture deck and external hard drive. 
2) I was cleaning up my external hard drive.  I ejected it and now it won't come back on line when it is plugged in.  Any Advice?

Most external FW enclosures have 2xFW800 ports that allow daisy-chaining multiple drives.
There are FW800 hubs available, but I don't recommend them if you intend to use with a camcorder or deck.  Ditto regarding daisy-chaining a camcorder or deck with a FW drive ... the camcorder/deck usually locks up the FW bus if you have daisy-chained it with a FW drive.

Similar Messages

  • Need Help with External Hard drives and too much music

    I am not terribly tech-savvy, and I need your help. I have a G5 PPC dual processor with an internal 250GB drive. I have two seagate firewire/USB2 external hard drives. One is 250GB and one is 350GB. I want to know how to use them to get my Mac to run faster and better.
    My original hard drive is 7GB shy of being full. Almost half of this is my itunes library which is over 100GB. The older (250GB) hard drive has about 150GB of photos/videos.
    My Mac is running slow as molasses and when I power up the external hard drives it slows down to what I recall my original Mac Plus ran like.
    I use the G5 primarily to work with photos, illustrations and creating the occasional DVD with video and photos. the apps I use most often are Photoshop, Illustrator and Painter. I always listen to music while work.
    I hope all of this information is helpful! Here is my question:
    What is the best way for me to set up and use these external hard drives to return my G5 to its original blazing (to me) fast speed?
    PPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

    I think you should look at adding two 500GB internal drives. I'd say Maxtor MaxLine Pro for cost, but they also run much warmer (43ºC even when nearly doing zilch) so I'd go with WD RE2 500GB for $40 ea. more.
    dump whatever you don't need, trash anything that is hogging space and is just temp file or useless cache. Web browsers can leave behind a ton of small files eating up tens of MBs.
    Use SuperDuper to backup/clone your drive.
    Disk Warrior 4 to repair (after it gets to 15% free, or just forget for now).
    A 250GB drive formats to 240GB and you have ~3% free it looks like.
    For every data drive plan to have two backup drives.
    Keep your boot drive to 40% used.
    And your data drive to 60%.
    Backups can go a little higher.
    Drives are cheap and inexpensive, especially for the space and performance. And they have improved SATA over the years it has been out.
    By doing a backup followed by erasing your drive, and then restoring it, using SuperDuper, which optimizes the organization, skips copying temp files that aren't needed, it also defragments your files. I would do backup daily to different sets that you "rotate." And before any OS update. And do the erase and restore probably every 2 months.
    Make sure you keep one drive partition somewhere that is just your disk utility emergency boot drive that is not a copy of working system, used for doing repairs like running Disk Warrior and Disk Utility.
    You may need to repair; backup; even erase and restore your external drives. Rather than spend on vendor made case, just pick up a good FireWire case either with drive, or bare (and add your own). I think it'd add 500GB FW drive though.
    Why?
    To begin backup of your current drive. To leave your other FW drives "as is" for now.
    Then install a new internal 500GB drive as well so you now have a good current backup, and you have moved your data off 250GB to 500GB. If anything happens, you have one off line FW backup.
    Then begin to clean up, organize, and get your FW drives working. It sure sounds like they have had some directory or file problems.
    You can find a lot of Firewire and SATA drive choices over at OWC:
    http://www.macsales.com/firewire/

  • Trouble with external hard drive and disk repair

    So I save my music and photos to an external hard drive. The drive is partitioned to also be the back up for my Time Machine. I live in an old house with the electricity for my MacBook Pro and the external hard drive coming from a wall plug which drapes scrape over when opening and closing, occasionally moving the plugs to the point of cutting off the electricity. Sometimes when that happens, the MacBook Pro won't read the external hard drive and I have to restart the computer for it to read the HD.
    Well, this seems to have happened again, only this time it wasn't reading the HD when restarted. I Opened the Disk Utility and did a verify disk, and was told that I couldn't save anything to the drive, but to access the files that were on there. So I attempted to do a disk repair. What happens at that point is instead of getting the solid blue line indicating the repair is happening, I get the barber pole blue line indicating it's trying to access the HD to begin repair. This goes on for hours at a time without the repair taking place.
    Can anyone out there give me a "for Dummies" overview of how to get the Disk Utility to repair things?
    Thanks.

    What I was trying to tell you is that all the music and photos that are on the same drive as your Time Machine backup must also be backed up elsewhere. Unlike all the stuff on your primary (internal) hard drive, those photos and music are not backed up at all unless you have copies of them on a different drive. If your Time Machine hard drive should fail before you do that, they'll all be lost. So copy all the music and photos to your second external hard drive as soon as you are able to do so.
    I generally consider the nuisance of backing up extra hard drives to other extra hard drives burdensome and annoying enough so that I always upgrade my primary (internal) hard drive whenever I begin to run short of space on the one I'm using. Now that it's possible to get 750GB and 1TB internal drives for MBPs, I'll get one of those as soon as my present 250GB drive fills up to about 80% of its capacity. I don't want to lug around an external drive in order to have all my stuff with me when I'm away from my home or office — I want it all on my internal drive, and I want to be able to back all of it up at once to an external drive of the same or a larger size. At least until I outgrow a 1TB drive, and I think that will be a while.

  • Help with External Hard Drive

    Ok, I have all my music on an external hard drive, and a brand new version of itunes that is completely blank. I'm trying to transfer the music from my external hard drive into Itunes but am having trouble. I've gone to file - add to library - and then chosen my music folder in the external hard drive, and Itunes starts to look like it'll load the songs in, but then nothing happens and the main song menu remains completely blank. Any ideas?

    Ok, well i was using limewire to get some llegal shareware files and wanted to make sure i didnot get any viruses.
    I am swapping drives, my internaal drive is fucniction yetn when i scanned with disk utility it siad Catalog file, illegal namee (in red) so i booted form my mac install disk ran disk utility, aand it did not fix. So some told me to get disk warrior, which i did, ( i ddownload form there site) and it told me to boot form another drive.... but i could not since m 250 gb drive is corrupted.....so i used a old 10gb drive i had kicking arround... i formated it, then installed maac os x.... and then put disk warrior on it, aandd tried to boot form it.
    Yes i am swapping...
    O i just thought of this, could i put the hard drives in my windows computer and then use my network to boot form them?????
    no, i never iinstalled noton on my exdternalls, jusdt my internal...
    how do i burn the disk warrior cd? I Tried burning the disk image and it would not give me the option to boot form it

  • Very slow transfer speeds with external hard drives through Firewire and US

    Hi All,
    My external drives transfer very slowly on my MacPro. I've been searching for answers and have turned up very little. Apple support suggested I post my issue here. Just to make a note, I measured my disk speeds with both AJA System Test and copying files between drives and reading the Disk Activity in Activity Monitor.
    I have 3 external drives, all MyBook Premium or Professional, 1x 500GB, 1x 1TB and 2x 1TB in RAID 0. I had them on Firewire 400 and the RAID 0 2TB one on Firewire 800. My transfers on FW were all around 24MB/sec on all drives (much less than what I should be getting with FW400). I then read somewhere that the FW bus on the MacPro uses the slowest speed connected for all FW connections. So I unplugged everything but the FW800 Raid 0 drive and my transfer rate jumped to 40-60MB/sec. This is much better, but still about half or so of what I expect it should be producing from an external RAID 0 setup.
    To keep my FW800 backup drive faster, I've plugged the other two into USB2.0. The transfer speeds on both drives are now hideous, around 10-15MB/sec. This is so slow, but I'm not sure what to try to fix my speeds.
    The HD's in the external drives are all 7200rpm, and all should be transferring at a higher rate. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Ideally I'd like to get everything transferring at rates they should be transferring at, but I'll settle with my current FW800 speed of 40-60MB/sec if I can get my other two drives transferring at a non-snail pace.
    Is this a common issue? I can't believe I'm the only one plugging multiple external hard drives into their Mac Pro. I hope someone has a fix or solution for this. I'm all ears!
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    Hi Kappy, thanks for the information.
    So I rejigged my setup a tad. My RAID 0 is still FW800, the second drive is back on FW400 on the back port, and the third is USB 2.0 on the back as well.
    It's interesting to note that I saw the FW800 taking a bandwidth hit if the FW400 drives was being read/written to. For example, if I was averaging 50-60MB/sec on the FW800 drives and copy something large to the FW400 drive, each drive averages out to about 30/MB second, roughly half the FW800 speed I was getting. The USB while the slowest didn't cause any slowness on the FW drives.
    Here are my Xbench results. These results are from each drive being benchmarked individually with no other drives being tested at the same time.
    *MyBook 2TB in a RAID 0 configuration: Firewire 800*
    Results 75.42
    System Info
    Xbench Version 1.3
    System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
    Physical RAM 16384 MB
    Model MacPro3,1
    Drive Type WD My Book
    Disk Test 75.42
    Sequential 80.92
    Uncached Write 69.16 42.46 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 110.79 62.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 53.66 15.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 136.76 68.73 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random 70.62
    Uncached Write 36.38 3.85 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 140.55 45.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 93.26 0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 88.38 16.40 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    *MyBook 1TB on Firewire 400*
    Results 47.73
    System Info
    Xbench Version 1.3
    System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
    Physical RAM 16384 MB
    Model MacPro3,1
    Drive Type WD My Book
    Disk Test 47.73
    Sequential 52.47
    Uncached Write 48.45 29.74 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 53.76 30.42 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 43.69 12.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 70.91 35.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random 43.78
    Uncached Write 17.29 1.83 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 98.83 31.64 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 76.33 0.54 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 97.01 18.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    *MyBook 500GB on USB 2.0*
    Results 40.60
    System Info
    Xbench Version 1.3
    System Version 10.5.5 (9F33)
    Physical RAM 16384 MB
    Model MacPro3,1
    Drive Type WD 5000AA External
    Disk Test 40.60
    Sequential 35.99
    Uncached Write 37.31 22.91 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 37.22 21.06 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 26.62 7.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 50.27 25.27 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Random 46.55
    Uncached Write 20.37 2.16 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Write 68.44 21.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    Uncached Read 93.55 0.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
    Uncached Read 86.71 16.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]
    So Kappy are you saying that those speeds look normal?
    Thanks

  • Help with external hard drive please????

    I am ready to chuck my computer out of the window I am so frustrated!! I really hope someone can help... Fingers crossed, here goes...
    I have two macs - a MacBook running OSX 4.11 and an iBook G4 running OSX 3.9. I also have an Iomega external hard drive. I reformatted it when I bought it for the MacBook, and have been using it fine.
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    Is this the case?
    Why won't the Iomega talk to the iBook? (the Iomega website says macs need no drivers for their products...)
    Can anyone think of any genius ideas for getting the info off the iBook? Bearing in mind that there is no DVD writer, my internet connection is a teeny 2mb/s and the largest alternative storage device I have is a 2 gigabyte photo card (which i have been using, painstakingly, but is causing me massive grief by taking all night to upload from the ibook and then all day to transfer to the hard drive via the macbook, and losing a bunch of files in the process => AAAAAGH!!!!!). I've also tried firewiring the ibook and macbook together but they don't recognise each other. I created a network and accessed the iomega from the ibook via that but the 2mb/s broadband was so slow it would have taken all week, and the machines crashed anyway.
    Thoughts? Ideas? Inspiration? Magic wand????
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    Ok, deep breath & relax...
    What format & partition table is the drive in?
    On the macbook with drive installed, Open up Mac HD/Applications/Disk Utility.app
    Select the drive from the list. If the partition scheme is GUID, then 10.3 won't be able to see it.
    & changing requires a reformat of the drive.
    So, what I would do is hold T while booting the macbook until the firewire logo shows on the screen. plug the 2 macs together via firewire 400 cable. your macbook should now show up as a firewire drive on the ibook.
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  • Help with external hard drive connection

    I have two external hard drives. One is connected to my PCMCIA card firewire and the other to the original firewire port. When I get into the final cut pro program, the program shows little red slashes through my different things that I have put into the computer. I need to know how to retrieve those files. The computer does show that the external hard drive is connected, but it shows that the media is offline. I have done this before I just want to know how to reconect the media. I think it should be easy. Please help.

    Have a read of of your Final Cut manuals, Volume IV, Chapter 6, Reconnecting Clips and Offline Media, then experiment with ctrl-clicking the offline files and selecting Reconnect Media.
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  • Need help with external hard drive!

    Hi all,
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    Ok just to clarify the format issue...
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  • Troubles with external hard-drive and iPad

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    Thanks, I'll try connecting the HDD to the front USB ports and the iPad to the back. I did some more digging after posting here (my search-fu is weak!) and found a similar suggestion.
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    Great! Glad you fixed it.
    Message was edited by: maclover

  • My final cut is running extremely slow after having for 6 months.  I use external hard drives and save nothing on my computer.  it takes a long time to render now. do you think something is wrong with computer. took it to mac store but they fail to help

    my final cut is running extremely slow after having for 6 months.  I use external hard drives and save nothing on my computer.  it takes a long time to render now. do you think something is wrong with computer. took it to mac store but they fail to help me.  I have a 13 inch mac book pro 10.6.8 8gb 2.3 gfz intel core i5

    What did Apple tell you about what they did (or did not) find here?
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