Firewire issues after Snow Leopard...

Ok, after reading this huge listing of complaints and repair suggestions, I feel I need to add my two cents.

In general, I am using a SimpleTech ProDrive 1TB FW800 external drive and an Iomega 500GB FW400 external drive and most of the time I have no issues with throughput or access.

However, even in 10.5 Leopard I would have the occasional problem of the FireWire drives not showing up. Oddly enough, I would also have issues with USB drives showing up (I currently have two of those as well, both 500GB.) It seems the upgrade to 10.6 SL has improved the USB issues (the most effective fix prior to SL was moving to Belkin USB hubs,) the Firewire issues, while still very minimal, do occasionally crop up where one or the other FW drive would not mount or for some reason would dismount while the other maintained normal operations. Obviously, I have the two drives separately plugged in to the FW400-FW800 ports on the back of my iMac. When I originally daisy-chained them (400 into 800 through 800 port) they would both drop simultaneously.

The point is, this issue doesn't seem to be solely on the drive vendors' side since the drives I have normally work fine. Rather, something either in the FW controller within the computer or in the assembly process seems to be causing an intermittent issue that, as yet hasn't been fully resolved. Considering the issues most of the rest of you are having, I'd have to guess that the problem is on both ends and we're stuck in the middle.

As yet, the Simpletech and the Iomega have worked well for me. But this might make the point that Apple needs to adopt the eSATA standard for external drives as they've adopted SATA internally.

Hi. An update on my situation from page 7 in this thread. I believe that in my particular case the issue is related more to the drive that started off this whole thread (Chris' WD Passport Studio 500GB) than anything else. Apple replaced my iMac's main logic board and my FW is now working fine, under SL. My FW 400 works with my scanner and WD MyBook 1TB Drive fine, but alas the WD Passport Studio still does not work. Nor does it work on my other iMac, nor does it work on 2 Macs at the Apple Store (1 Leopard, 1 SL). Ditto for the shiny new replacement WD Passport Studio that WD sent me. (or the other new one they sent me a month before). Seeing that the drive also does not work under Leopard (Albeit one Macbook at the Genius bar) has so far led me to focus on the drives themselves. My conclusion is that WD Passport Studio drives are simply unreliable on FW800 - given that I've had 3 from them that don't work on 5 different Macs. (Or perhaps the issue that people are having with SL was also present in some way in Leopard, but maybe not in as many cases). And, BTW, like others, 10.6.2 didn't do anything.

Add me to the list of people with FW400 issues in Snow Leopard. Running on an Intel Mac Mini, clean install of Snow Leopard with all updates applied. I'm using a 1TB FW400 Freecom hard drive.

To highlight just how bad this issue is here are some benchmarks from Xbench:

http://twitpic.com/qvqp9

Compare to the same benchmarks run against my 500GB USB Freecom drive:

http://twitpic.com/qvrhp

I've fired off an email to Freecom support, hopefully this issue will get resolved.

Who do I contact at Apple about this? My Mac Mini is no longer under warranty but surely this doesn't matter if its a software issue?

Hello Luke,

I rang apple using the number listed in the 10.6.0 book (Page 53 in my book)

They did not ask about warranty or anything. They were only interested in the serial number of the computer.

The tech support person called me today to tell me he was waiting to hear back from his engineering team about the results of the tests I ran last week. If it is of any help my call number is 87784241

My 2 cents...

I've been running a DAW for the past 18-20 months using a MacBook, Logic Pro and an M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge Interface off the Firewire 400 port on a MacBook and (recording files onto) a FW G-Drive on the same FW Bus... no problems, happy days, great rig, never let me down, everyone's impressed.

I 'upgraded' to Snow Leopard, now on 10.6.2, and basically both devices no longer live happily on the same FW bus. Audio glitches everywhere! I've swapped all cables, reinstalled the OS, drivers, apps etc.
The only thing that I can put it down to is 10.6
There has to be a problem with the SL Firewire integration!

M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge
Logic Pro 9.02
M-Audio 1.9.3 Firewire Driver
OSX 10.6.2
Model Name: MacBook
Model Identifier: MacBook2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz

The solution?
Get rid of SL and go back to Leopard.
That's what I'm planning to do if this is not resolved.
I don't think it will disadvantage me in any way.

I have just discovered another problem with my setup. If I daisy chain my Canopus DV encoder through any of my working Firewire Hard Drives, it doesn't work very well. Often I get no sound, sometimes just a black picture with a vertical stripe. If I plug up the DV encoder directly to my MacBook Pro, then it works OK.
As ted583 says, going back to Leopard may be the solution. This is what I am going to do now, as I need to crack on with some work, and SL is preventing me from doing so.

Just found this.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Search/displayFAQDetails.cfm?ID=591

I will try it when I get a chance.

I'm getting the feeling all the problems are related to Prolific chipsets used in some devices.
Can anyone tell me if they are having problems with Oxford chipset devices?
Look in your system profiler under FireWire.
I might be up a dead end alley, but worth a try.

p.s.
I cannot find any reference to -
PL3507C MacPower_ODDonly20090916.hex
anywhere.

I have now downgraded to Leopard 10.5.8 (I had to do a clean install) which took a couple of days, as I had to hand migrate all of my Apps as Leopard won't Migrate from a newer version.
All done now, and all my Firewire devices are daisy-chained and working fine. Thats a very old Lacie drive, a Maxtor One Touch drive, the problematic (in SL) Freecom drive, and a Canopus AVDC-100 DV converter.
I have also noticed that my MacBook seems just as snappy in Leopard as in SL. That could be because I "cleaned house" when I moved to SL, by hand migrating and leaving out thousands of App Support and pref files of old Apps going back to OS9!
Interestingly, I had noticed in SL an occasional sort of pregnant pause, while my Mac was "thinking" for just a fraction of a second (sometimes a second or so). This seems to have vanished in Leopard. I am therefore sticking with Leopard for now.
I may clean up the OS a little with Monolingual to remove the PPC architecture files, I just need time to sort out my back-ups first.

Annoyingly, I'm having this issue too. Although for me, it seems to have started after installing the latest security update on my mac pro 06 (SL yes). and I might add, just leopard.

USB and FW seemed to be screwed up a bit.

I use a KVM switch and it will only work for a few minutes, then the USB refuses to recognize it and it won't recognize the front USB ports either.

I've reset the PRAM which turns out to be a temporary solution.

cheers,
keebler

It seem to happen in Windows 7 too. After the Snow Leopard boot camp driver install, my NewerTechnology MiniStack v3 is now unusable. It only work in USB but with so poor transfer rate that I want to kill myself...

To Keebler:

I noticed the same thing with my KVM box the other night; I thought it was the KVM USB ports going on the fritz. I ended up using a different hub and connecting directly to my Mac Pro.

Hi, today i bought 2 WD My Passport Studio 500 and can confirm that the drives do not work correctly with FW 400 and FW 800! They work fine with USB.
The PRAM reset only brought temporary fun as others already reported! Now it is not working again... Takes 5 attempts until the drive is recognized by the OS. Then after working on the drive for a few minutes (or seconds) Finder crashes and immediately recovers after the firewire cable is disconnected!

Come on Apple! We need a fix for this! My WD MyBook Pro worked flawlessly before Snow Leopard!

Regards,
lynx