Current FireWire 800 drivers limitation - confirmation needed

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LMA1980 Author

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Current FireWire 800 drivers limitation - confirmation needed

I just got a Seagate GoFlex Desk of 3TB USB3.0 ; I connected the device using an USB2.0 (happy the standard is still backward compatible) to see if the device is functioning.

Try it on the FireWire 800 adapter and I unhappily had to contact the Seagate support. They respond as follow :

I understand that you're having an issue getting the 3 TB Go Flex Desk to mount.

The reason for the Mac OS not recognizing the drive is because the Mac OS currently does not have the firewire 800 drivers that support drives that are over the 2 TB limit. This is unfortunately one of the limitations of the Mac operating system. At this time, Mac is currently working to develop firewire 800 drivers that support the larger hard drive size, but no information has been released by Apple, that we know of, as to when a driver update would become available.

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Could I get confirmation as I couldn't find any knowledge base on that issue? I may have not used the proper keyword...

Thank you very much.

iMac 24" 2007, Mac OS X (10.6.6), 3TB harddrive.

Posted on Mar 14, 2011 6:46 PM

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Answer 1

red_menace

Level 6

17,030 points

Mar 14, 2011 8:20 PM in response to LMA1980

Does USB see the full drive and not Firewire, or do neither see the full drive? What is the drive formatting and partition map? From the advertisements it looks like the issue would be with the partition scheme used, since HFS+ in Snow Leopard can handle volume sizes of about 8 exabytes.

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Answer 2

LMA1980 Author

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Mar 14, 2011 9:53 PM in response to red_menace

FA GoFlex Desk :

Capacité : 3 To (3 000 592 977 920 octets)
Support amovible : Oui
Disque amovible : Oui
Nom BSD : disk1
Identifiant du produit : 0x50a1
Identifiant du fournisseur : 0x0bc2
Version : 1.00
Vitesse : Jusqu’à 480 Mb/s
Fabricant : Seagate
Identifiant de l’emplacement : 0xfd100000
Courant disponible (mA) : 500
Courant requis (mA) : 0
Type de carte de partition : APM (Carte de partition Apple)
État S.M.A.R.T. : Non géré
Volumes :
Capacité : 262 Ko (262 144 octets)
Inscriptible : Non
Nom BSD : disk1s1
Aperture :
Capacité : 3 To (3 000 458 477 568 octets)
Disponible : 2,67 To (2 673 969 479 680 octets)
Inscriptible : Oui
Système de fichiers : HFS+ journalisé
Nom BSD : disk1s3
Point de montage : /Volumes/GoFlex

And to confirm, the USB does work without trouble.

Message was edited by: LMA1980

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Answer 3

red_menace

Level 6

17,030 points

Mar 15, 2011 4:09 PM in response to LMA1980

Your disk is using the Apple Partition Map (APM), which does have a limit of 2TB. Apple has adopted the GUID Partition Table (GPT) though, which doesn't have that limitation - OS X 10.4 and later can mount GPT-partitioned disks, and Intel-based computers can boot from GPT, so you might see if your drive can be reformatted using that.

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Answer 4

LMA1980 Author

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Mar 15, 2011 5:55 PM in response to red_menace

Still again the drive is working on USB. If there is a limitation of 2TB it may be due to the size of the block. Still I will give a try to use GUID.

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Answer 5

LMA1980 Author

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Mar 16, 2011 5:55 AM in response to LMA1980

Did try to partition the drive with a (GPT) partition of 3TB : did not mount using FireWire 800 adapter.
Did try to partition the drive with a (GPT) partition of 2TB : did not mount using FireWire 800 adapter.
Did try to partition the drive with 2 (GPT) partitions of 1.5TB : did not mount using FireWire 800 adapter.

It is clear to me that the FireWire 800 driver is behaving a little different then the USB driver at this date (11/03/09). I think it is now time to open a support case with Apple and also with Seagate.

Big thanks to red_menace for his help. If you got something else I could try I haven't yet think of I will be please to test again.

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Answer 6

red_menace

Level 6

17,030 points

Mar 16, 2011 5:07 PM in response to LMA1980

If this is a new device, there may also be a problem with the bridging chips in the drive enclosure (it happens). I don't have a 3TB drive, but I've got a couple of 1.5TB drives in an enclosure with multiple interfaces, and Firewire 800 works just fine.

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Answer 7

Mar 19, 2011 8:04 PM in response to red_menace

I also have the issue with Seagate 3T Ext hard drive via USB2/3 (tried both) and it is recognised in Disk utility, but not as an icon on the screen and I have formatted it already in GUID format.
Seagate help were useless and Mac help, not much better.
Still have not found a solution

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Answer 8

LMA1980 Author

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Mar 19, 2011 8:24 PM in response to Aussieboy9

To begin with your trouble Aussieboy9. Could you verify or confirm us that your Finder's preference is set to show External drives (under the General setting)? Or could you see it through the lateral bar on a Finder window?

On the other side : I have push a little more my finding, the FireWire adapter work on a G5 without trouble running 10.4.

I also had time to test 10.5 on my Intel iMac and not much more chance on that side : note that I now think that my FireWire port may be dead.

Still need to test with 10.5 on the G5 to validate if it is a driver issue.

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Answer 9

Mar 20, 2011 10:20 PM in response to LMA1980

Hi to answer your question. Finder is set to show Ext discs in the preferences and I can see the 1 and 2T Seagate discs on the desk top, but not the 3t
I have even tried to "mount" the 3T in disc utility, but this also does not work
Regards,

Steve

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