best practice for external drive?

Question

best practice for external drive?

A really basic set of questions, for which I ought to know the answers:

with four external firewire drives connected, three of them daisy-chained to one FW800 port, the fourth to a second FW800 port, do I:

a) when shutting down the computer, eject them, or can I just shut down the computer then shut down the drives?

b) when ejecting the drives, is there a particular order (eg, the drive that is actually connected to the computer of the three which are tied together being last to eject?)

c) when sleeping the computer, is it all right to leave the drives spinning and let them sleep when they realize the computer is sleeping?

d) when starting up, start the drives before turning on the computer? I've actually forgotten this, and started the drives after the computer was up and running, and it doesn't SEEM to have any ill effect, but am I doing something dangerous?

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), 2.8GHz quad-core, 12GB RAM

Posted on Mar 31, 2012 11:20 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Niel

Level 10

726,893 points

Mar 31, 2012 11:25 PM in response to Michael JS Cox

1. The drives are automatically ejected/unmounted when the computer is shut down normally.

2. No.

3. Yes.

4. You aren't. USB and FireWire drives are hot-swappable.

(65253)

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Answer 2

John Galt

Level 10

141,126 points

Mar 31, 2012 11:32 PM in response to Michael JS Cox

OS X is pretty tolearant of whatever you do. Just don't turn them off or unplug them unless you either turn off the computer or eject the volume by dragging to the Trash.

So

a) shut down the computer then shut down the drives: yes

b) doesn't matter with my FW drives, but I suppose there could be some that will not pass the FW signals if it is shut off. I believe if they are built correctly they should work like mine and the FW communication will pass through the devices that are powered down.

c) OS X should be in control of drive sleep. Some HD manufacturers have firmware that conflicts with OS X and insist upon sleeping the drives when they ought not to, or vice versa. When sleeping the computer, just ignore the drives. Do not shut them off though or else OS X will scold you for having removed them unexpectedly. They should sleep on their own, but if their firmware insists otherwise, there is nothing you can do about it.

d) This doesn't matter at all, unless (obviously) you need to boot the computer from one of the external volumes.

Read about OS X file system journaling - it should ease your mind about potential corruption: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2355

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Answer 3

Apr 1, 2012 9:18 AM in response to Niel

Thanks Niel and John for your rapid replies, both of which agree and are helpful. One of the reasons for this enquiry was that one of my three LaCie D2 Quadra drives refuses to behave, it sleeps and doesn't wake when I click on its icon on the desktop, it doesn't eject properly: I've removed it from the chain until LaCie tells me what's going on. I know there is a fix on their site called "USB 3 updateer" (http://www.lacie.com/download/drivers/LaCied2QuadraFirmwareUpdater_1.0.3.zip) but its unclear how I should install what is inside the folder.

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