Panther Eats FireWire 800 Drives

the_webmaestro writes: "Apple has announced that Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) may cause corruption with external FireWire 800 drives (anything with an Oxford 922 chip). Fortunately for me (unlike the poor souls who've already had problems), I guess I'm glad I ordered a lowly a 250GB Firewire 400/USB2.0 Combo Drive..." maccw reports that Firewire 400 customers are also reporting problems, as detailed from this Wired story.

Comments

Updates

[dynayellow]

According to this Apple page the problem is with the chipset.

OWC has posted a firmware update for their drives, as has Wiebetech. It looks like the Wiebetech requires you to update the firmware in Jaguar, and then they don't recommend using it IN Jaguar afterwards... Sheesh.

Re:Updates

[gunnk]

THANK YOU!

The parent post is much more informative that the story itself, which links to the Apple Special Message page while appearing to have no knowledge of the content on that page (i.e.: problem is a chipset bug, not a Panther bug).

After the previous story in which Apple was said to be refusing to release security patches for Jaguar anymore (with no links to any actual Apple statement), it looks like any story that seems to paint Apple in a bad light gets no review at all. Come on -- we should be able to expect a LITTLE better editorial review of story postings than this!

In this case the title of the story is misleading and sensational, while the content puts the blame on the wrong party. Apple is doing a good job of getting the word out to people that may have the faulty chipset so that they don't get burned by the problem. Making this sound like a failure by Apple is just plain wrong.

Apple motherboards kill firewire bridges

[littlerubberfeet]

I work at a small sound studio. We use macs for their stability and simplicity. I had been trying to figure out what to do with the 4 dead WD Caviar 30gig drives, 5 dead Maxtor 80 and 160 gig drives, and 4 dead Que! CD-RWs. They are all external firewire devices. After getting no where with Maxtor or Apple, and not being able to pinpoint the failure to a single G4 or circumstance, I took apart the damn things.

ALL the drives were still perfectly good. The firewire bridges were bad. ALL the drives were advertised as hot-swappable. Almost all of the brideges died during, or after a hot-swap procedure. Indigita, a bridge company, has been gracious enough to test some stuff for us.

I suspect that the problem isn't just with panther or bridge firmware. I think there is a problem with the mac firewire interface generally, expecially when hot swapping.