Lacie D2 250gb disk slow with G4/400...

[peskybeaver]

I purchased a Lacie D2 Extreme (firewire 400/800) 250GB disk and it is only writing at 913k/second. I am using it on a G4/400 tower and do not have the problem with a 120GB western digital (firewire 400) drive. (it writes at 20MB/sec)

Any ideas? Lacie has already sent a second drive and it's having the same trouble. They're not sure what is wrong. The drive works fine on a new ibook g4, just not on my 5 year old tower. I'm running OSX 10.2.8 and everything is up to date.

Thanks for any advice!

Aaron

 

[yellow]

Any ideas? Lacie has already sent a second drive and it's having the same trouble. They're not sure what is wrong. The drive works fine on a new ibook g4, just not on my 5 year old tower. I'm running OSX 10.2.8 and everything is up to date.

How is it hooked up? Directly to FW (are there 2 ports on your Mac, I don't remember)? Daisy chained? Tried switching cables and ports?

 

[peskybeaver]

How is it hooked up? Directly to FW (are there 2 ports on your Mac, I don't remember)? Daisy chained? Tried switching cables and ports?

Hooked direct with nothing else on the fw bus. Tried both ports and multiple cables. No go. For the hell of it, I tried the following (potential) remedies:

1) repaired permissions, shut off computer, unplugged ALL cables from the back. let sit 5 minutes.

2) plugged in the monitor, kb and mouse. Restarted.

3) plugged in drive, still slow.

4) formatted drive with OS9 drivers. tested, no go.

5) reformatted and partitioned into 4 50mb partitions. Still slow.

6) Tested drive on a g3/400 powerbook (pismo) and the wirte speed was up to par.

Any ideas? buy a different brand drive? different firewire card? Thanks!!

Aaron

 

[yellow]

Strange. How about the logs? Anything relevant in the logs?

 

[peskybeaver]

Strange. How about the logs? Anything relevant in the logs?

Not sure how to check that. how do I go about it? what do I look for? thanks.

Aaron

 

[yellow]

Not sure how to check that. how do I go about it? what do I look for?

Your logs are in /var/log/system.log and /Applications/Utilities/Console (which is actually a viewer for /tmp/console.log). You can view them in the terminal with "more".

sudo more /var/log/system.log

I can't really tell you what to look for, there's just too much to say about it and I don't even know what to tell you to look for.. Just leave the FW drives unplugged from the computer for 15 minutes, then note the time, plug in the large FW drive, try some simple copies, and then unmount and unplug the drive. Then look in your system.log and console for relevant entries around the times when you plugged in, copied, and unmounted/unplugged.

 

[peskybeaver]

Just following up...

Tested my Lacie bus-powered dvd burner on the built-in firewire port of my G4/400 tower and had similar speed issues...took 3 hours to burn a disk! Finally broke down and bought a two port PCI firewire card. Now everything works fine.

So I suppose there's something incompatable with my onboard firewire chipset. Works fine with my older firewire devices, but not the newer Lacie hard drives or dvd burners.

The card was only $15, glad to have resolved the problem!

Thanks for the advice.

Aaron