[Neilwhit]

I just bought a 60GB external Firewire HD and am having serious problems with it. On my Pismo Powerbook, it seems to work okay, although it does have problems showing up on the desktop on occasion (OSX.1).

On the other hand, on my G3 BW (rev. 1, original HD on internal IDE controller, second HD on Sonnet IDE PCI card) I'm having all kinds of problems. VERY SLOOOWWWWW copying in 10.1, but fast in 9.2.1. Very troublesome when trying to mount the external in OSX, but always mounts in 9.2.

I had originally formated and partitioned the external HD with OSX Disk Utility. THat ended up showing terrible problems in Norton. I then noticed that OS9 Disk Utility doesn't support formatting the external Firewire, which made me wonder if using OSX to format the drive was safe.

Fom one of the forum messages I saw some success with HEat Utilities, so formatted and partitioned the drive with that. Again, seems to work reasonably well with the Pismo in OSX, but still get the same very slow copying on the G3 BW and have a very difficult time getting it to show up on the desktop.

Any ideas would be much appreciated. Having to reboot into 9.2 just to use the external is a pain. And why the problems with the G3 BW and not the Pismo?

[chris v]

What brand drive is it? My maxtor drive came with its own formating utility which I had to use, because drive setup in OS 9 didn't see it. Did yor drive come with any utilites?

Did you ormat it HFS+ or UFS? HFS+ is what's reccomended.

Maybe boot back into 9 and reformat it?

CV

[Neilwhit]

It's an OWC (Other World Computing) Mercury w/Oxford 911 bridge. It came with Charismac utilities, but in reviewing Charismac's site, they don't seem to have ANY OSX support.

Originally I formatted/partitioned it with OSX Drive Utility in HFS+ with the option for OS9 drivers, but had the problems described above.

That's when I did some digging in the forums and found the reference to people successfully using Heat Utilities for OSX Firewire use. But still no go on the G3 BW.

Since then I have looked at material at
Accelerateyourmac.com that suggests there is a serious problem with Firewire, Oxford 911 bridges and OSX 10.1. I have an email in to OWC tech support for a supposed firmware upgrade.

Hopefully this is the answer to the mystery. It is still interesting that it seems to work reasonably well on the Pismo, but not the G3 BW.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Corys]

I had the same problem with a FW drive I bought a while back...I also have a pismo and a B/W G3 (Rev B mobo), the drive worked great on the pismo but would never work on the Blue/White, I attempted to get the drive to work on a total of 4 different G3's, all had the same problem, Slow copy speeds, not mounting etc etc.
I tried all of the Formatting software available at the time, nothing worked.
same thing would happen wether in OS9 or OSX, After reading the Apple Support site, I came to the conclusion that some of the B/W's had problems with firewire Hard Drives...
I finally gave up and threw it in as an internal IDE drive and sold the case on ebay.
not much help, but that was my experience.

[Neilwhit]

I'm getting that feeling myself. I did the OWC firmware update, and in testing last nite on the G3 BW, it now mounts, unmounts and remounts just fine, and didn't have or cause directory corruption on the first set of tests.

Onthe other hand, the data copy speed is horribly slow in 10.1. I tried several copy tests and it just crawled along.

Makes me wonder how it can be considered that the G3 BW's have Firewire capability when you can't seem to get any speed much better than a USB drive.

Although to be fair, it isn't quite as bad in OS9, which makes me then question why would the performace suffer so badly in 10.1???


The mystery continues!

[Neilwhit]

An update:

The OWC Firewire/Oxford 911 frimware update has cleared up the problem with mounting in 10.1, and it appears that it's not getting the directory corruption problems it was getting. That part is great.

On the other hand, it's almost useless on a G3 B&W with 10.1. The transfer rates are horribly slow. I'm wondering if this is related to the problem that B&W G3s are having in 10.1 with Firewire CD burning (it doesn't work).

Everything seems to work fine with my Pismo Powerbook and 10.1, so at leat that's fixed.

Let's just hope Apple can fix the Firewire bug with G3 B&Ws!