Firewire 400 misbehaving

[heynsmd2]

I have an external firewire drive (Esquest) that I use for video editing. I've had the drive since 2005.

The problem is it keeps causing problems on all the macs I've used it on (PowerBook G4, iMac and MacBook). The drive works well but after ejecting it and shutting it down, if you power it up again it doesn't show as 'mounted'... I have to go to Disk Utility to remount it. Sometimes it won't even show on Disk Utility or it seems it makes 'Disk Utility' hang... the whole computer will become slow (when powering up or shutting down).

The only way to fix the problem is to switch off computer and the wall power! (Apparently that resets the FireWire Bus...). Is this problem unique to my external drive or does everybody experience this with Firewire? None of my USB ext-HD's has this problem.. Any suggestions short of getting another drive?

 

[mchalebk]

When I was using an external FW drive , I wouldn't usually eject it. I left it connected all the time. When I would put my Mac to sleep, the drive would spin down. It would then spin back up when I woke the computer up.

If I ejected it, unplugging the FW cable, then plugging it back in was all that was required to mount the drive.

 

[velocityg4]

Since the problem is repeatable on multiple computers I would say there is something wrong with the controller in the drive enclosure. Likely the only way to rectify this is to get a new enclosure. Which is cheaper than a whole new drive.

You can get these on Newegg.com. The Bytecc ME-350U2F(V3) firewire enclosure though it is quite ugly. Since you said it is from 2005 the internal HD is likely IDE but you should check first as you may need a SATA enclosure like the MacAlly PHR-S100SUA.