Firewire 800 problems on red drives

[Frederick Giles]

Anyone experience the loss of the firewire 800 port on their reddrives. I was the 1st/2nd AC on a feature shoot just before christmas. On the 2nd day of the shoot we lost Firewire 800 connection from the two reddrive's to our macbook pro. Drive would not show up in devices pane or desktop. I tried it on another macbook pro and had the same issue. Worked fine with firewire 400. So downloading took twice as long as I would have liked. Using firmware 21.3.1, which is an experimental build that came shipped as part of the rental. I didn't have enough time to roll back the build during the shoot. I don't think firmware was the issue. Any ideas out there. I wouldn't like to experience that problem again.

 

[Mark Allen]

[Edited because I misread something in the original post, sorry.]

 

[jimhare]

When I do multicam, I collect all drives and run them off so I have been in front of dozens of drives.

I found this issue on one old drive.

No matter what I did, it would not work via FW800, power supply or not. Worked fine on FW400. Tried on multiple computers, same thing.

I think the owner sent it in for a firmware update and it now works fine with FW800.

To this day not sure what the issue was, but you're definitely not alone.

 

[Jeff Coatney]

Had an FW800 bus go out on a Red Drive. Probably due to poor power management on set -- the Drive AC cable should be plugged into a UPS to guard against spikes. Red fixed it.

 

[David Collard]

Yup. Had two of our four 800 ports go bad.
Ours were out of warranty and RED wanted about half their
value to fix them, so we declined to fix them. We use the 400
ports on those and have labeled the drives.

Caution: the word on the street is to never plug in a drive relying on the 800
port for power. Always use the ac adaptor. That's all I know.