Still waiting Snow Leopard allow me to use FireWire port

Question

Hi Everybody:
Completely dissapointed with the not ready yet multi bugs Snow Leopard.
After reading from all of you, the fact that SL can`t detect my FireWire port
I`m sure will seem just a minor problem comparing with all I read everyday
happening to other users.
I`ve tried everything that a long time Mac user knows by essence.
I defy helper people in this forum to find me a solution but I`m quite sure
that this freezed Snow Leopard will not mount my FireWire.
Thanks in advance to everybody.

Answer 1

Hi, skyluco,
I've been following this issue in various places since SL came on the market, in a variety of forums. I suffer from the problem myself with a Pioneer drive in an external casing fitted with a "Prolific" bridge.
It seems to affect all of the Pioneer "1O0" series (108, 109, 112, 116, you name it) , but some other brands' like Sony drives from the same period, have been affected too. Some later Pioneer drives don't seem to suffer from it but sometimes need to be running before the system is booted to be able to work properly under SL.
I had initially assumed that the problem was the Prolific bridge (which has a bit of a history of problems) but people with these drives in enclosures with Oxford, and other bridges, also seem to have issues.
The same drives seem to work fine under USB, which suggests that it involves some sort of interaction between the drive and the FW bridge and SL, rather than a simple problem easily "blamed" on one component or the other.
Unfortunately the only solution available at present is to use the drives through USB. It MAY be that a firmware update of either the bridges or the drives, OR a change to SL's implementation of FW could fix it. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the first two solutions, though, as these are mostly "old" drives in terms of the lifespan of technology these days. It is a long, long time since Pioneer last updated the firmware for my Pioneer 109, for example! Maybe the later drives, like the 116 , might score one, though.
As far as a "fix" in SL goes, my bet is that this would probably depend on whether it could be tied into a more general SL update for other FW issues. FW 400 issues with older external burners might not be at the forefront of Apple concerns these days, though, given that the only Mac that still uses it is the plastic base level MacBook, which have a built in burner anyway.
I notice that performance under USB on my own external 109 burner when hooked up to a current model MBP's USB port is much better than it was on older Macs that I own, too, though still not as good as FW400 was on an earlier FW400 equipped MBP.
So I'm not holding my breath waiting for a fix, I'm afraid. At present the only solution is really to either use USB or get a new drive.
Cheers
Rod