[wags1_9_99]

I just got a 40 GB Maxtor 1394 External Storage hard drive, and am trying to use it through a Newer Firewire 2 Go PCMCIA card on my Wallstreet Powerbook. I have used the Firewire 2 Go card to connect to a digital camcorder and use iMovie with my internal HD just fine.

I'm running a pretty clean install of OS 9.1. In my Extensions Folder, I have:
FireSCSI Expert 1.6
FireSCSI Maxtor Enabler 1.6
FireSCSI Support 1.6
FireWire CardBus Enabler 1.0.1
FireWire Enabler 2.7
FireWire Support 2.7
Maxtor FireWire Support 3.1

The problem is this: I can sporadically get the Hard Drive to appear on the desktop. When I restart with everything turned on and plugged in, it doesn't show up (only the "Firewire" card icon on the Desktop.) The way I've gotten it to sometimes work is to unplug the Firewire cable from my Powerbook, power off the Maxtor HD, wait 5 seconds, power up the HD, plug the cable in. Then, when it does mount, it probably takes 45-60 seconds to do so. I can copy stuff to the HD nice and fast. However, copying stuff FROM the HD is very slow, like 10BaseT Ethernet speeds. I did a benchmark program on it, and here's the results I get:

Sequential Read Sequential Write Random Read Random Write
173.938 KB/sec 6.062 MB/sec 173.162 KB/sec 6.066 MB/sec

Any help would be appreciated. I don't know if the problem is with the Hard Drive, the PCMCIA card, the drivers, or more than one of these. Thanks!

I have heard bad things about the Maxtor software. So when I got the 80GB Maxtor drive, I did not even touch their software. I used a shareware drive program called the HEAT Utilities or something of that nature. The drive works great with my G4 system. Obviously, your situation is different.

[wags1_9_99]

Update:

I tried using the drive without any of the Maxtor drivers installed--only the Apple-provided Firewire 2.7 drivers. The drive mounts much more reliably when I plug the firewire cable in, but reading from the drive is still dead slow. Also, when I start up, the drive doesn't automatically mount.

I plugged the drive into a B&W G3 running 8.6, Firewire 2.3.3. I had to load the Maxtor drivers, but then everything worked slick--nice and fast.

So, I'm guessing its a conflict because both the Firewire 2 Go and the Maxtor hard drive are using the Apple Firewire drivers?