Getting the Red Drive to mount on the front FW800 port of an octocare...

[Jeff Brown]

Chaps

Here's an odd one.

Whenever I try to mount a red drive on the front port of my MacPro 2.8GHZ OSX 10.5.4 it will not show up. It spins up but is not visible in disc utlity. Is this because the port is not bus powered?

It works fine on the back port and also fine on my MacBookpro (which is also 10.5.4).

The port is fine for other external/powered hard drives.

Was just wondering if there is a setting that needs to change....

Thanks in advance

Jeff Brown
RED 708 "Ruby"

 

[Sam Winzar]

I wouldn't worry about the front port not being bus powered, it's the RED DRIVE that's not technically bus powered. Even though it will occasionally mount with out being plugged into the mains, I don't believe it's officially support when just running of the firewire bus. Plug the drive into some power and it should mount without an issue.

 

[Jeff Brown]

I'm not so sure - I never use the power pack for the red drive and they mount fine on my MacBookPro and I've also seen them mount fine on other Mac Pro towers...

 

[ThomtheEditor]

99 times out of 100 it will mount w/o power adapter , i've had an issue once where it wouldn't mount when the drive was really really full (like 90%), i don't know if that was the issue but is definitely seemed to be an issue. Thankfully it mounted it fine with the power adapter added.

Another instance under similar circumstances yielded no fw800 connectivity at all (even with the power!) but would operate fine with fw400+power (we have since used that drive a dozen times all successfully w/ fw800 (w/o power) since this occurrence, figure that one out!
~T

 

[Alex Carr]

I suspect that when this RED drive gets so hot, that the points used to connect the FW800 port to the bridge board become loose. I've seen this on many electronics that get extremely hot... Xboxes, ipods, other external HDD cases...

After thinking about it on set, where I had a RED drive that would no longer mount over FW800... I wanted an Explanation... Either shorted out, or the port became loose and is no longer getting good contact with the bridge board inside. As a last ditch effort I knew I could always switch the Drives to another Red Drive enclosure and get the Drive to Mount. Even though its a Raid, You are merely 'replacing' the RED Drive enclosure, FYI for desperate measures...

 

[Brian Broz]

I've been having this issue as well.
My RED Raid doesn't always mount when taking bus power via FW800/MBP. Often a re-boot will help but not always.
I had issues at the end of the day yesterday but not at all today.
When this first happened (after several reboots) and the RED Raid didn't mount...I thought to myself "hmmmm" I should have brought that power supply with me! Definitely worth throwing in the kit.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff,

If your drive works on other ports, but not the one on the front of your Mac, then you may need to have that front port examined. The front FW800 port on the Mac Pro is indeed powered and should mount the RED drive just fine. ...It's where I primarily attach my RED Drives on a daily basis and I've never had a drive not spin up and mount.

 

[Alex Carr]

Only lately have I seen this too, I suspect its common with heavily used Drives... I had one that only mounted over 400, whether I used teh power supply or not... I wouldn't let them shoot anything on it, its not worth the hassle. Once the ports go out on it, get it replaced before you try to risk using it.

 

[Monty Bass]

Hey, had a similar problem. I hooked it up to 2 mbp's, using all the connections and AC adapter and a dell using Vista. Wouldn't show up!

Took it home and used my gf's vfx machine running xp64 and it showed right up!
Gotta love XP.

BTW, it was bus powered over FW400.

 

[Craig Schober]

me too

me too

for the first 2 years, my front fw800 port always worked fine for me too but it has not worked once for mounting my red drive in the past 6 months. stopped mounting through that port like a switch one day. fw400 mounts fine...too lazy to try the rear fw800 port so far.

 

[Mike Prevette]

Works fine for me, but I ALWAYS use the power adapter with the drives.