[tycheung]

I tried running stuff off of a Firewire hard drive (specifically, Baldur's Gate II), and it seems to freeze the game after maybe an hour or an hour and a half, to the extent that OS X becomes unusable (after force quitting the program, the cursor just spins infinitely, and gradually, things begin to lock up)and a force reboot is required. Is it possible that the FireWire port is being "overloaded"? A bug in the driver? The drive in question is an OWC mercury elite with an IBM deskstart 120 GXP, running off an iceBook.

[bradoesch]

I don't think you'd be overloading the FireWire bus. It has a maximum theoretical speed of 50 MBps, and it's likely that you won't pass 5 MBps playing your game.
It sound like this could be a bug in the driver. Although the driver you are using is from Apple (likely), so you won't be able to get an update from OWC. Perhaps there is a firmware update for your FireWire enclosure. That might help.

[Macola]

Originally posted by tycheung:
<STRONG>I tried running stuff off of a Firewire hard drive (specifically, Baldur's Gate II), and it seems to freeze the game after maybe an hour or an hour and a half, to the extent that OS X becomes unusable (after force quitting the program, the cursor just spins infinitely, and gradually, things begin to lock up)and a force reboot is required. Is it possible that the FireWire port is being "overloaded"? A bug in the driver? The drive in question is an OWC mercury elite with an IBM deskstart 120 GXP, running off an iceBook.</STRONG>

Have you tried using OS 9.x? I've found that Firewire in OS X is still pretty buggy in general, and processes that work happily in OS 9 (like capturing DV, large file copies, etc.) bring OS X to its knees on many occasions. This happens independently of the hardware (I've used three different Firewire hard drives and a couple of CD burners).

[tycheung]

The programmer who did the Mac port also seemed to think it was the drivers, as he didn't think anything in the code could affect the OS the way I described. Bummer....I thought the drivers were supposed to be better implemented in OS X. Just one of the many rough edges, I guess.

I'll try it under OS 9 the next time I have to reboot into it

does the owc mercury have a fan, I looked and I don't think it does. I think that the constant reads would build up quite a lot of heat, which is the worse thing possible for a hard drive. I would not run a game that constantly reads info off of a drive without a fan. I just lost an ibm 7200rpm drive and I am pretty sure it got too hot.

[jtc]

Originally posted by tycheung:
<STRONG>I tried running stuff off of a Firewire hard drive (specifically, Baldur's Gate II), and it seems to freeze the game after maybe an hour or an hour and a half...</STRONG>

I had the same problem. BG2 would freeze after a while in both 9 and X when I ran it from the FW HD - I did a little troubleshooting and found that it didn't matter if it was a full or minimal installation. Copied the full install onto the iBook's internal drive, and it hasn't crashed since.

I think it's the FW drivers. I have two (used to have three) FW hard drives and a FW burner, and have noticed that there are problems when using them for long stretches. More often in OS X than 9, but it does happen in both OSes.

The only "fix" I've come up with is to not boot from the FW drives so I can unmount them when I'm not using them. I also run diskwarrior on them once a week or so - this seems to help, too. I've noticed that DW fixes quite a few things even if the drive seems to be working fine.

[ 01-22-2002: Message edited by: jtc ]

[tycheung]

Originally posted by &lt;ryudo&gt;:
<STRONG>does the owc mercury have a fan, I looked and I don't think it does. I think that the constant reads would build up quite a lot of heat, which is the worse thing possible for a hard drive. I would not run a game that constantly reads info off of a drive without a fan. I just lost an ibm 7200rpm drive and I am pretty sure it got too hot.</STRONG>

hmmm...there aren't any temperature safeguards/shut offs for this? Would drive overheating also cause OS X to lock up?

Originally posted by tycheung:
<STRONG>

hmmm...there aren't any temperature safeguards/shut offs for this? Would drive overheating also cause OS X to lock up?</STRONG>

when my drive was overheating, the system would just lock up. I think it is because the drive was not actually unmounted but just stopped responding. The system still sees the drive and sort of expects to get info from it but doesn't (just my speculation, of course). As far as I know there aren't any safeguards or shutoffs for heat (except for the fans). If your case has a fan then this is probably not your problem.

[tycheung]

OK...it happened again. I force quitted the program, and then fiddled around for a while. top and ps -axu didn't show anything running, so I remembered an episode from a while back where my CD-RW was causing OS 9 to cursor spin to oblivion, and I just unplugged the drive.

The system came back to life, after complaining the drive wasn't properly unmounted, and everything was normal. I plugged the drive back in, ran a disk first aid check on it, and everything seems OK. I touched the case of the drive, and it was a little warm, but not hot - at least not as warm as the iBook palm rest, in comparison. Then again, the casing is pretty thick polycarbonate and you probably can't really tell that well.

I guess it could be the drive heating up, or could it have something to do with Firewire port hanging? weird....does anyone know if there were documented Firewire port hanging problems? I seem to remember hearing something about issues with early firewire comps. having trouble when waking from sleep and I'm wondering if this is similar.

I

[Macola]

Originally posted by tycheung:
<STRONG>
I guess it could be the drive heating up, or could it have something to do with Firewire port hanging? weird....does anyone know if there were documented Firewire port hanging problems? I seem to remember hearing something about issues with early firewire comps. having trouble when waking from sleep and I'm wondering if this is similar.

I</STRONG>

I think you're a victim of OS X's Firewire bugs. I've come to live with occasional flakiness with three different Firewire HDs and a CD-RW, and I've experienced the same problems plus others. There were some problems in OS 9 as well, but not as severe. Maybe it will be fixed in 10.2 (I hope).