[drissa]

Hi

Just got a Powerbook with a Lacie 120GB F/wire drive.

1. I understand that you need to 'eject' the drive if you want to unplug it. Does the same apply if you are simply shutting the machine down? Presumably, you don't need to turn it off each time you power-down the Mac?

2. Really, the drive needs to be moved around quite a bit. How delicate is it? Would it be a bad idea to keep it in the laptop bag, along with leads etc?

3. I have the 12" P/book, so there is a single 400(MB/bps?) F/wire port. This leaves me needing to connect a DV camera to the other F/wire port on the drive. I understand that this may start to tax the F/wire buss - dropped frames etc? Any thoughts on this? Presumably, this is a fairly standard set-up and should be pretty dependable?

[superlarry]

Originally posted by drissa:
Hi

Just got a Powerbook with a Lacie 120GB F/wire drive.

1. I understand that you need to 'eject' the drive if you want to unplug it. Does the same apply if you are simply shutting the machine down? Presumably, you don't need to turn it off each time you power-down the Mac?

2. Really, the drive needs to be moved around quite a bit. How delicate is it? Would it be a bad idea to keep it in the laptop bag, along with leads etc?

3. I have the 12" P/book, so there is a single 400(MB/bps?) F/wire port. This leaves me needing to connect a DV camera to the other F/wire port on the drive. I understand that this may start to tax the F/wire buss - dropped frames etc? Any thoughts on this? Presumably, this is a fairly standard set-up and should be pretty dependable?

1. when you shut down the mac, it automatically unmounts all volumes, so you don't have to eject it/turn it off when you shut down or restart.

2. the drive should be alright in a laptop bag - all modern drives "park" their interior moving components so that they can't easily cause damage when they get banged around. that's not to say they're invincible, but you'll probably be alright (i assume you don't treat your powerbook case badly).

3. i haven't seen dropped frames or any problems with the same setup on my 12" - i can only anticipate potential problems if you're importing/exporting DV while doing a huge file copy on the drive at the same time, but that's probably more likely when the DV is on that drive and it just can't keep up (not a fault of firewire). my firewire DV camera (canon zr20) is actually only a 100Mb/sec device, for what it's worth, so i can't imagine it saturating the bus alone.

[drissa]

Many thanks Larry. All very reassuring.

[Freeflyer]

Just to second what Larry said, I have an external 120Gb drive for my powerbook and it's been bounced around a few times.

Just make sure to eject it before you unplug and you'll be find.

J.