Daisy Chained external drives

[Terri French]

I have three daisy chained firewire 800 drives on my Mid 2011 iMac. Lately I have been having some problems with my computer.....I been trying to isolate the problem and the problems only seem to appear when the external drives are connected. Today I watched a YouTube video on daisy chaining and it said that to properly mount the drives you need to turn them on one at a time, wait till the first shows the icon on the desktop before turning on the second. Does this mean that I should unmount them every time before turning off the computer? Also, what happens if the computer goes to sleep? Should I turn off the energy saving feature of having the hard drive go to sleep after one hour of non-use? Will that mess up the hard drives?

I have just been leaving the drives plugged in and turning the computer off and on with them mounted. Perhaps this is my problem.

 

[Outrigger]

I have three daisy chained firewire 800 drives on my Mid 2011 iMac. Lately I have been having some problems with my computer.....I been trying to isolate the problem and the problems only seem to appear when the external drives are connected. Today I watched a YouTube video on daisy chaining and it said that to properly mount the drives you need to turn them on one at a time, wait till the first shows the icon on the desktop before turning on the second. Does this mean that I should unmount them every time before turning off the computer? Also, what happens if the computer goes to sleep? Should I turn off the energy saving feature of having the hard drive go to sleep after one hour of non-use? Will that mess up the hard drives?

I have just been leaving the drives plugged in and turning the computer off and on with them mounted. Perhaps this is my problem.

I have never unmounted my drives when powering down or letting it go to sleep. There is no need to do that or plug and replug.

 

[Bear]

May I suggest seeing if the issue persists if you only have 2 of the 3 drives connected? Maybe one drive is starting to have an issue so you should try all 3 combinations of 2.

 

[Terri French]

I got in touch with Apple Care. She told me that I did not need to unmount and mount the drives for shutting down. I sure appreciate the responses here. The tech had me run a safe start and my issues seem to be better. Perhaps something went wrong when I installed Mavericks. I am hoping that the issue is resolved, but only time will tell.