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I have 2 issues with my MP USB2 and FW800

philipma1957

philipma1957

macrumors 603
Original poster
Apr 13, 2010
6,457
332
Howell, New Jersey
okay the pro has been at the house for about 1 month. first off as a side issue I should be able to get iLife 2011 for $6.99. Not a big deal. Just wanted that off my chest.


I am having 2 problems. The usb2 jacks front and back are not playing nice with my EDIROL USB AUDIO INTERFACE UA-1EX. I needed more USB jacks so I purchased a PCIe card from owc


http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technology/USB2E/

it works fine. now if I reboot I still lose the audio but If I go to preferences sound option and pick the EDIROL all is fine. when the EDIROL was using any of the 5 MP usb2 jacks/ports after reboot the machine would not play at all and instead of going to sound preferences and picking the EDIROL for output. I needed to unplug and then plug the usb2 cord back in. Since the 5 ports seem to work with my other gear and I need 7 ports I was going to buy a pcie card. So I rate this as a minor annoyance.


MY FW800 issue is different Every fw800 drive and piece of gear I have works and is picked up. They just do fw400 speeds or fw800 speeds without any rhyme or reason. I don't want to buy another pcie card. I added 2 pcie cards one for the USB2 and one for esata. I have just 1 pcie slot left.

Has anyone had this fw800 problem? I would like a fix if anyone has one. I hooked my owc qx2 up to the fw800 cord. it has a clone of my 6tb osx software raid. it is bootable and it is mounting at fw400 speed. this is not a killer for me but it is annoying.
 
I'm guessing that the EDIROL device is requiring more power than the built-in USB ports are providing. Is it a bus powered device?

Do you have any FireWire 400 devices connected? If you have a FireWire 400 device connected, it will cause all the other devices on the same chain to drop to FireWire 400 speeds. An easy way to check would be to launch System Profiler and click FireWire on the left side of the window.
 
pastrychef said:
... If you have a FireWire 400 device connected, it will cause all the other devices on the same chain to drop to FireWire 400 speeds. An easy way to check would be to launch System Profiler and click FireWire on the left side of the window.
Click to expand...

Only if you have FW800 devices beyond the FW400 device (i.e. further away from the Mac than the 400 device). If you have:
Mac>FW800>FW800>FW800>FW400, for example, you should get 800 speeds on the first three devices and 400 on the last.

This is the exact setup I have. Having previously confirmed the throughput speeds on the FW800 devices, I also checked System Profiler as you mentioned, and that confirms the 800 speeds for the first 3 and 400 for the last.
 
this is why I am a bit annoyed.

All this fw800 gear worked on the mini with all fw800 speeds at least the profilers read that way and the gear was fast and acted like the speed was fw800. writing zeros was around 70 mb/s.

This is not critical for me unless the internal raid0 osx fails then I would use my osx backups and at fw400 speed it would be sooooo slow until I rebuild everything. as far as I can see the macpro has 1 fw800 hub that is split 3 ways. I am hoping that my problem is the fw800 hub I added . I can check it out later. I pulled the verge fw800 hub and set my units up without it. full speed fw800 is back. so it looks like the pro does not want a tag on hub.
 
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