[lngtones]

Just got an Core Duo mini today and was planning on running it with an external firewire hd as the main boot disk for performance reasons. Everything installed fine, and it seemed like everything was working but now I can't go 5 minute without it simply locking up the whole system.

Wondering if it was a problem with the drive, I tried another firewire drive I have as well. Same setup, single partition, reformatted GUID filesystem and so on. The second drive couldn't even get through the second install disk before freezing.

The interesting thing is one of the external enclosures supports USB2 as well. I tried booting with that and I used it for a while and no freezes! However, it was really apparent that it was running over USB2 as things were definitely not as fast as the Firewire stuff I was able to do before it would freeze.

So it looks like there could be something wrong with my mini's firewire. Or is this kind of setup just generally not supported?

Oh yeah, I also turned off the put hard disks to sleep mode and that didn't fix the problem.

[JKT]

Have you updated the firmware on your FireWire drives to the latest version? Invariably, problems with FW drives are caused by out-of-date firmware for the e.g. Oxford chipsets. If it is a commercial drive, check their website for firmware updates. If it is a self-assembled drive visit FireWire Depot. Click the Firmware info link at the top of the page to get an app for checking what firmware version you have and for installing any updates.

[quiklee]

not just firewire drives . . . .on USB 2.0 drives too . . . . i do suggest not putting too much media in one folder as that may help speed up the read time of your externals