Back in February, I wrote here
about how I (foolishly in hindsight) plugged the FireWire cable for my
CD burner into the PCI FireWire adapter in my Umax SuperMac S900 while it was booting up.
This caused a hard crash, and the S900 subsequently refused to boot
properly with the OS 9 FireWire extensions enabled.
I was eventually able to get the PCI FireWire card working again by
removing it from its slot, rebooting the computer, shutting down, and
reinserting the card. However, I am a lot less sanguine about
hot-plugging FireWire devices than I used to be.
Last week I received the following note from reader John Davis:
Re: FireWire: Hot Swapping Isn't Always a Good
Idea
Hi Charles,
I just read the above article, and I too agree it's
ironic that the highly touted "hot swap" advantage of FireWire
technology is actually a disadvantage when considering the cost of
replacing or repairing damaged equipment. In my case the situation has
proved extremely costly.
I manage the Center for Digital Media at the San Francisco Art
Institute, where we run a couple Mac networks with
approximately 40 FireWire enabled computers and roughly 7 or so
FireWire peripherals. These peripherals include video decks, CD
burners, and peripheral hard drives. Of these, three Panasonic video
decks now have burnt out motherboards from hot-swapping to and from
Apple G4 towers (the decks cost $900 new, and $1,200 to replace the
motherboards). Our JVC video deck has been in for repairs to the
FireWire bridge three times at approximately $400 per repair. Two
FireWire peripheral hard drives have fried, and four peripheral
FireWire CD burners have burnt-out bridges, making the cases useless
(we have since loaded those CD burners as internal units in the
towers). This puts the grand total of damaged and repaired FireWire
devices at roughly $3,500. Quite a nut for the convenience of
hot-swapping, wouldn't you say?
The most frustrating part about this is that Apple
won't recognize the problem. They blame the devices and the
"questionable" quality of the manufacturers' construction. They claim
that the Apple equipment is tested and reliable and that all such
problems lie with the manufacturers. I say that's B.S., and that at
least, Apple should recognize this as a major issue and warn consumers
in advance that this problem exists.
What do you think?
Sincerely,
John Davis
Well, John, it appears that the problem is even worse than I
imagined when I wrote the article.
I agree that Apple should provide more information and warning about
potential FireWire problems. My iBook owner's "manual" (i.e.: thin
pamphlet) says essentially nothing about FireWire, other than
identifying the location of the port.
Certainly most FireWire peripheral vendors trumpet hot plug ability
as a major feature of FireWire.
By coincidence, WiebeTech has just published a white
paper that provides useful information on the causes and
prevention of FireWire port failures, especially in host computers.
"We have seen much interest on the part of FireWire
users regarding this subject as judged by recent comments on industry
websites. We think users will be interested in reading our analysis of
the cause and prevention of port failures," said James Wiebe, CEO of
WiebeTech.
Statistics for total failures of FireWire ports is not
known. Judging from the number of posts on Apple's website:
<http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?14@103.67TDaKsJjbJ.2@.ef0a4bc>
as well as posts on the website:
<http://www.macintouch.com/firewirereader02.html>
this topic is assumed to be of interest to many
readers.
The purpose of this report is to provide background
and technical analysis of the failure of the ports. In conclusion,
methodologies will be suggested which may substantially reduce the
incidence of damage to host ports.
The article lists a number of possible causes of failure and
potential workarounds and preventatives, as well as outlining measures
WiebeTech has taken with its own products to help minimize the
potential for damage, such as power switches on bus-powered FireWire
devices and a technique that allows the power supply of the FireWire
device to "soft start" while the device is still in the off position.
The white paper is well worth checking out for anyone interested in or
concerned about this issue.
Your hardware failures all seem to have been in third-party devices,
rather than the ports or motherboards of the Macs themselves, but there
have been lots of reports of FireWire port failures as well,
particularly with Titanium PowerBooks.
One possible preventative workaround for folks who do a lot of
hot-plugging would be to use PCI or PC Card FireWire adapters, even on
machines that have built-in FireWire support, as a "sacrificial"
buffer, if you will, that will be cheaper to replace than a motherboard
if a failure is experienced.
I'm wondering if using a FireWire hub rather than a direct cable
connection might protect peripheral devices to some degree.
It is considered heresy to say so by some in the Mac community, but
I have to wonder whether USB 2.0 might actually be better technology.
I'm not saying that it is; I don't know enough about the engineering
distinctions between FireWire and USB 2.0 to make an evaluation.
However, as nice as it is when it works, FireWire obviously has some
issues.
However, one clear advantage that USB 2.0 does have is that with so
many more companies supporting its technology, a much wider selection
of peripherals - such as digital audio and video devices, DVD-R and
CD-RW drives, digital cameras, and whatever - are going to be available
with USB 2.0 than with FireWire.
Anyway, check out that WiebeTech article and be careful plugging in
those FireWire devices.
