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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Is anyone else losing the Firewire 800 port on their Red Drives?

D

David Wyatt

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We've had the odd firewire 800 port go on our Red Drives in the past and have simply sent them back to Red for repair. Now we've got our camera and a 'B' body out on a tv show and every single Red Drive's firewire 800 port has died within days of each other (that's 5 drives!!).

I can't really work out how this is happening - in the past we surmised certain makes of external hard drives were causing spikes to the firewire 800 ports, especially if daisy-chained, but for the last few months we've been using Iomega UltraMax 1TB hard drives (configured in Raid 1) without any problems at all (and no more daisy-chaining). The on-set set-up is an 8-core Mac Pro with an internal mirrored drive, Riello Digital Plus 200 UPS, and a number of the Iomega 1TB UltraMax hard drives. The back-up chain has been firewire 800 out of the Red Drive (using the AC adaptor for power) into the rear firewire 800 of the Mac Pro and at busier times the Iomega has been plugged into the front firewire 800 port of the Mac Pro (so the data is writing to the Mac Pro and the Iomega at the same time (perhaps this is the problem??)). We've tried different firewire 800 cables and also tried it on a MacBook Pro with the same result - no firewire 800.

Anyone else been having firewire 800 woes?
 
It's a bit of a pain having to send them back (especially if they all crap out at the same time), leaving you driveless for a week or so (especially on a long format show). We're now having to get a fourth Red Drive just as an emergency back-up (I thought 3 would be more than enough!!!). Hopefully when the Pinewood facility opens it won't be so painful...or the problem could even be identified and solved??!!
 
davecw said:
...on a tv show and every single Red Drive's firewire 800 port has died within days of each other (that's 5 drives!!).
Click to expand...

With that many drives failing I would look for some other common denominator -

Are they always being attached to the same download station? Using the same cables?

Same power adaptor?

Correct power adaptor? (Most adaptors look alike - someone could be using one meant for another device!)

Is the DL station running off generator power? How good is the genny? Is it delivering clean sine-wave power or is it a cheap putt-putt?

Is the DL station connected to a UPS/power conditioner? If not, why not?
 
Hiya Dave,

I had a 2nd Drive FW800 go on me last week. It's back in for repair at the moment, but I'm led to believe that whatever the "fix" is it will ensure that the problem does not re-occur.
 
CrewPix.com said:
With that many drives failing I would look for some other common denominator -

Are they always being attached to the same download station? Using the same cables?

Same power adaptor?

Correct power adaptor? (Most adaptors look alike - someone could be using one meant for another device!)

Is the DL station running off generator power? How good is the genny? Is it delivering clean sine-wave power or is it a cheap putt-putt?

Is the DL station connected to a UPS/power conditioner? If not, why not?
Click to expand...

Hi Brent,

Yes to all of the above. Like I mentioned the DIT station is running off a UPS (UPS is plugged into studio mains, no genny).

A couple of our Red Drives have already been back to Red for the fix that apparently should solve the problem, and since that we had a good few months without any problems (including 5 weeks solid on a feature), but unfortunately it looks like the old problem is back...would LOVE to get to the bottom of it. If we could either identify a piece of equipment to avoid or a common backing-up method that's causing this, that would be great. By far the most annoying thing above all is the not knowing why and just dumbly waiting for it to happen again...
 
Us too. But on the good side, it has three options (FW800, FW400 and USB) so if one fails, there are two more that will allow downloads. Too busy to send them back for repair so for now USB is our favoured solution.

Cheers,

Paul
 
I've noticed before that once the firewire 800 goes the 400 isn't far behind...but the USB too? Bummer...
 
I've never lost any before that, but then they all went at once. Ive seen the 800 out on a few rental drives, but other than that, I am shocked they all went out at the same time.
 
I've also lost FW800 on one of my drives. So far, the FW400 remains intact. It seems like there may be a design, or component weakness here. I say this not to knock RED, but just to confirm it's certainly not looking like an isolated problem. I'm sure RED are giving this all due attention and look forward to hearing of a solution rather than needing to repeatedly return them for repair.
 
800 and 400 gone on same drive. USB held steady. Funny how slow doesn't seem like such a big problem when the USB cable is the one that saves the day :)
 
I've lost ports on LaCie, Gtech, etc and so far everything points to plugging in multiple firewire drives in at the same time and one drive is causing the other drives to lose their ports. Not sure if this is the same with the red drives but since I stopped plugging in multiple drives on to the same bus, I stopped having problems. YMMY.

Also, sometimes a port may seem dead, even on the computer side, but all it needs is a reboot or a hard reboot (pulling the power cord), or resetting the pram on the mac to start working again.
 
we had a firewire 400 port die on a rented Hvx200, so we called out the rentat shop to replace it, which they did within 15min, anyways the rental guy told me that you can "burn out" the firewire ports if you plug them into a turned on device (i.e computer). I think something to do with they are not properbly insulated or something... as this post reveals im am not a techie...

I have never heard of this before, although he said it happens alot - so to my more tech-wise reduser buddies, could it be something to do with the above mentioned, "electricity issue"?
 
Hotplugging firewire may cause problems. Are you unmounting firewire discs every time before unplugging?
 
Yep, we're unmounting the Red Drives from the desktop or ejecting in the Finder window as per normal procedure. Somewhere, somehow something is causing a power spike that's blowing the firewire 800 port (daisy-chaining can certainly cause it but we avoid that like the plague these days). I don't know enough about such things but I'd guess that it maybe involves a cheap or substandard component that can't take the power that comes down the firewire 800 cable for bus-powering? It sounds like Red are perhaps replacing or upgrading something if they're saying that the problem should be fixed for good once a Red Drive goes back to them for repair...idle speculation on my part...any word from Red about this..........????
 
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