Repeated FW800 failure with Red drive and Early 2011 MacBook Pro

[Alex Veitch]

Hi All

I've had the FW800 port fail on three drives during the job I am currently on. My set up is:

- Two Early 2011 17" MacBook Pros, each 2.3 Ghz processor and 8GB RAM.
- ADC UPS system, from which all equipment is powered.
- Each MacBook Pro has a sonnet Tempo SATA Pro card. I'm connecting two G-Tech 1 TB drives to each of the laptops
- We are (with very limited exception) only shooting to the Red drives. The drives are being powered by the Red mains adaptor and are connected directly by FW800 to the FW800 port on the computers. The first two times the drives had been connected using the FW cables provided by the rental house; the third and last time I was using a cable from the G-Tech drive.
- Both laptops have been powered down overnight.
- Both laptops are running in 32bit mode as I am transcoding in Avid Media composer after the download.

I've now had the port go on three of these drives. In each case, FW400 and USB works fine. I had asked the rental house for non-powered FW800 cables, but they did not have any. After the death of the third port, I made my own using the guidance here:
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?47838-Non-powered-firewire-cables!/page8


My question is, is there anything I am doing wrong that could be causing these problems, or have I just been unlucky? The rental house is now wishing to charge production, but its not the first time I've had a drive break like this (including when I have used their own set up). Also, I see from the thread above, and other links on RedUser, that such problems are commonplace.

Thanks

Alex

 

[Curran Giddens]

Red officially recommends the non-powered cables. They should have supplied you with the correct cables to begin with. Production should not be charged, IMO. The rental house should have done their homework. I wonder what they were thinking when you asked for the non-powered cables....

 

[Thomas Akira Nakasone]

Have you tried only connecting one of the g-tech's at a time, instead of both. I have had many issues with the sonnet tempo...and have found the backup process is much more stable using just one drive at a time.

 

[David Wyatt]

More likely than not it's a FW800 cable problem - FireWire 800 is a notoriously fickle technology. Get good quality, brand new cables and treat them with TLC.

The Firewire port isolator cable is a good arrow to have in your quiver - when we experienced repeated FW800 blow-outs this cable seemed to cure the problem but also around the same time the RedDrives went back to Red HQ and had some magic performed on them and the problem seemed to go away after that. When you're renting you're never really sure whether the rental RedDrives have had the "fix" done by Red it's probably a good idea for DIT's to carry a Firewire port isolator cable as part of their kit:

http://www.angledcables.com/firewire-800-port-isolator--8009.html

As a sidenote we had some blown FW800 ports on Red Drives using G-Tech drives like you a couple of years ago (that's probably a coincidence though?)

 

[Filip Vandoorne]

if you are using older RED drives over fw800 on the newer macbookpro generation, it helps
to put a lexar fw800 reader between the RED drive and the macbookpro. It seems that the
firewirechips in the newest unibody macbookpro's give troubles with these older drives and adding
a fw800-fw800 device between them seems to solve the problem most of the time.
Also, if possible power the RED drives externally to avoid stressing the fw800 port

 

[Stephen Strangways]

It sounds like you had good power going to the laptop, but just for the sake of everyone's info, I had a problem with a crew using a slightly older MacBook Pro that had a known wiring fault, wherein the entire laptop casing became electrically if it wasn't properly grounded. It wreaked havoc on all transfers we tried to make over ExpressCard-connected peripherals. Everything reported working okay, not a single error message or warning from OS X, yet whether it was media on a FW800 ExpressCard, or an external HDD on an eSata ExpressCard, 70-80% of the data that passed over the ExpressCard port when the laptop wasn't properly grounded was corrupted.

 

[Alex Veitch]

Hi All

Thanks for the replies. I've checked my notes and the first failure had a Lexar in the loop (I wasn't downloading from a flash card at the time) , with the drive coming off this. After this failure, I'd switched to a direct connection.
@Thomas The G-Techs are connected to the esata, the red drive is not connected to them. Unfortunately I don't have time to complete the copies if I take one out of the loop - I would have to then daisy chain to a drive, which I think would be more likely to cause a problem.
@David were your blown ports with the same connection set up as me, or did you have red drives connected to the G-Techs? I'd heard of that causing problems.
@Stephen Yes, always powered, through the UPS which is also filtering/surge protecting.

Thanks all for your help. It does seem like an issue with the way the FW works in the drive from what people are saying - now I have my own homemade non-powered cables hopefully I'll have no further problems.

Cheers
Alex

 

[Alex Veitch]

@Filip Is there a way to identify manufacturing age for the drives? We are using a mixture of those owned by the rental house, and a couple that have been cross hired in for us.