one FireWire HDD will mount, but two will not, why?

[marcnyc]

Hello,
I just bought two USB/FireWire hard drives off of ebay (this model precisely: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=005&item=150026215277 )

I can get to mount them individually with FireWire 400 but if I plug in one daisy chain the other, the first one that was mounted disappears and I am told by OS X that the device was unmounted in a not proper way.

With USB I can mount both drives.

What could the problem be?
I remember in the days of SCSI you had to have different ID's on the drives, but I thought this was resolved now with FW, right?

Any ideas?
Thanks

[hayne]

Sounds like a hardware problem.
What you are doing should work (and does for me with my LaCie drives).
No configuration is necessary.

But note that it is best to have the firewire drives turned off when you connect them.

[voldenuit]

Shouldn't happen and definitely doesn't with Oxford-chipsets. Even one Oxford and one el-cheapo Prolific chipset does work here.

Make sure to use known good cables.

Get rid of defective drives.

[marcnyc]

I tried having them both on or off...
the cables are the ones that came with the drives and that work when used separately.
the drives are BRAND NEW!
what should I do?
PS interestingly enough, after this happens I am completely unable to mount the FW drive, even individually, it's as if firewire didn't exist anymore! until I restart the computer...

[cwtnospam]

Are the power cables for both drives plugged in? You can't daisy chain them if they're drawing power from the Firewire bus.

[trevor]

Are the power cables for both drives plugged in? You can't daisy chain them if they're drawing power from the Firewire bus.

That's not necessarily true. If both cases together take less than the total power provided on the FireWire bus, AND the first component in the FireWire chain passes power as the FireWire spec requires for 6 pin FireWire cables, then you can daisy-chain bus-powered drives.

I'd not recommend it, since the possibility of blowing FireWire PHYs increases with both bus-powering and daisy-chaining, but it still can work.

Trevor

[cwtnospam]

Ok, it's technically possible, but I'm not aware of any 3.5" drives that don't draw too much power to be daisy chained without being plugged into an outlet.

[trevor]

Yeah, that's a good point. There are few (http://wiebetech.com/products/ultragbplus.php) enough 3.5" drives that can run on bus-power even by themselves, much less along with another drive on the bus.

Trevor

[marcnyc]

interesting conversation, but unfortunately I have to say that both drives are powered with external AC adapters...
any other ideas would be greatly appreciated as at this point I really need to see both drives and the only way I have been able to do so, so far, is by connecting one via FireWire and one via USB, which still drastically slows me down... I bought these two drives to make backups and having to copy via USB is soooooo slooooowww

[voldenuit]

Show us the FireWire section of System Profiler with one and both drives plugged in and the log entries related to the problem.

[trevor]

The reason for the problem was given by Hayne in post #2. You've got a hardware problem of some kind. Exactly what hardware problem is not yet known.

It could be the cable, or the second FireWire port that you are daisy-chaining to, or a problem with the hardware in the drives. But it's hardware not software.

Possible solutions:
1. replace FW cable,
2. buy a FireWire card (if you have a Mac with expansion slots) and don't daisy-chain
3. buy a FireWire hub and don't daisy-chain
4. get a new drive that doesn't have this problem

[ozza]

Do you have iSight attached to a firewire port? Whenever I have firewire problems, I disconnect iSight...works everytime.

[marcnyc]

Ok, so first of all I have a PowerBook, so buying cards is impossible (unless it's a PCMCIA card, but why would I if I have a FW port that's supposed to work).
I don't have iSight.
I have tried with different FW cables.
I would really like to avoid having to buy a hub, more stuff to carry around etc etc...
The drives are brand new so I don't know why they wouldn't work. I have many other FW drives which work when daisy-chained so I know it's not the computer.

The FireWire section of the System Profile shows this with no drive connected:

FireWire Bus:
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec


with the first drive connected it says:

FireWire Bus:

Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec

(1394-ATAPI rev1.10):

Manufacturer: Prolific PL3507 Combo Device
Model: 0x1
GUID: 0x50770E00071002
Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Sub-units:
(1394-ATAPI rev1.10) Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x12804
Product Revision Level:
Sub-units:
(1394-ATAPI rev1.10) SBP-LUN:
Capacity: 232.89 GB
Removable Media: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
OS9 Drivers: No
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
Volumes:
PhotoDisk 1 (MAIN):
Capacity: 232.76 GB
Available: 215.64 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s3
Mount Point: /Volumes/PhotoDisk 1 (MAIN)

then when I connect the second drive it says:

FireWire Bus:

Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec

Unknown Device:

Manufacturer: Unknown
Model: Unknown Device
GUID: 0x50770E00071002
Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec

Unknown Device:

Manufacturer: Unknown
Model: Unknown Device
GUID: 0x50770E00071002
Maximum Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec

Does that help?
How should I interpret this?

Thanks a lot for you kind help and time. I appreciate that.

PS: One thing I will try is to daisy-chain one of those drives with one of the new drives too (I can't do it right now because I just finished doing this test and unfortunately everytime I connect both these drives I have to reboot the machine to be able to even use the FW port on my mac again).

[trevor]

Ok, so first of all I have a PowerBook, so buying cards is impossible (unless it's a PCMCIA card, but why would I if I have a FW port that's supposed to work).

Because
1. You get additional bandwidth for FireWire. Having more than one 3.5" drive on a FireWire 400 bus with current speeds will easily saturate the bus. Anytime the bus is saturated, you are not at the maximum potential throughput. You already have a slow workaround of using USB, obviously you want speed. A PCMCIA FireWire card will therefore give you additional speed when using more than one drive simultaneously.

2. Your current setup is not working. A PCMCIA FireWire card may let you do what you are trying to do, and in any event is not an expensive item, so it's not as if you've lost much by trying.

The drives are brand new so I don't know why they wouldn't work.

The newness or oldness of the drives is inconsequential, unfortunately. The one advantage it might give you is that you might be able to return non-working drives?

with the first drive connected it says:
Manufacturer: Prolific PL3507 Combo Device

OK. Prolific is one of the 'budget' FireWire bridge chipsets. The 'high quality' bridge chipset is made by Oxford. If you return the Prolific-based case and bought a case with an Oxford chipset, you will likely have far fewer problems.

One thing you can do if you want to keep this Prolific case is to check their website for a firmware update.

Unknown Device:

Manufacturer: Unknown
Model: Unknown Device
GUID: 0x50770E00071002

This is not a good sign. You said that both of these drives are identical? Well, they aren't identical at the firmware level. This second drive has the same GUID, but doesn't have any further firmware info. It's firmware is screwed up in some way. If you just return one of them and keep the other, this is the one to return. (Although I'd personally return both and get cases with an Oxford chipset.)

Trevor

[JDV]

Since this seems to have been an eBay purchase, return of the drive seems unlikely, since the seller probably made no explicit claim about whether the drives would daisy chain properly. THey might not even have known that was an issue. I -did- check the Prolific website, and while they manufacture the chipset, they make no consumer products, so I don't think a firmware update from them is likely. Samsung APPEARS to be the manufacturer of the drive enclosure, if the link was accurate, so it is possible that Samsung might have some upgrade available, but i also checked their site but could not determine what model the OP might actually have, so I couldn't tell if they had any updates.

I agree that the PMCIA firewire card is probably the best option with the least financial exposure. I rather expect it has something to do with drive termination that gets messed up when daisy chained. A Fantom drive I have explicitly warned against daisy chaining their drive, although they were specifically adamant about not using it with video capture devices. I believe the poster said that both drives worked individually, just not when connected together. Hence, it seems unlikely that the firmware on either drive is screwed up, except to the extent that it obviously doesn't like being chained.


Joe VanZandt

[trevor]

I -did- check the Prolific website, and while they manufacture the chipset, they make no consumer products, so I don't think a firmware update from them is likely.

No, here's a direct link to the Prolific PL3507b firmware update released on 19 May 2006: http://www.prolific.com.tw/support/files/%5CIDE%20Storage%5CPL-3507%5CFirmware%5Cfw_pl3507B_d042006.zip
Note that this is likely to require a computer running Windows.

Here's a link to the page showing various Prolific PL3507 firmware updates: http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=44

I believe the poster said that both drives worked individually, just not when connected together. Hence, it seems unlikely that the firmware on either drive is screwed up, except to the extent that it obviously doesn't like being chained.

Yes, that's true and a good point. However, the firmware is not reporting itself properly on the bus, so there's SOMETHING wrong somewhere with that drive even when not daisy-chaining. Perhaps the firmware was only partially updated?

Trevor

[marcnyc]

Actually that part of the system profiler showing the drive as unknown (the part that Trevor quoted) ONLY comes up when the drives are daisy-chained (hence, get unmounted). Separately the two drives do not show up as unkown.

[JDV]

That was my point, but Trevor may also be right that the firmware can be updated, but probably not from a Mac. My point that Prolific didn't actually make the hardware enclosure may well be irrelevant, but you might to well to try to contact the manufacturer of the enclosure to see if they know of the problem and recommend a firmware upgrade, if you don't want to try adding another firewire port.

Joe VanZandt

[marcnyc]

I am trying to track down the manufacturer but had no luck yet...

By the way, I tried daisy-chaining one of my other FW drives to one of these drives and it worked, so the problem is only between these two together...

bummer... I hope I can find a solution...

[trevor]

Actually that part of the system profiler showing the drive as unknown (the part that Trevor quoted) ONLY comes up when the drives are daisy-chained (hence, get unmounted). Separately the two drives do not show up as unkown.

OK, I misunderstood that. Can you also show us the System Profiler report on the second drive when it is the only device on FireWire?

Trevor

[cwtnospam]

By the way, I tried daisy-chaining one of my other FW drives to one of these drives and it worked, so the problem is only between these two together...
This probably won't work, but just in case, try changing the name of one of the drives, and then daisy chaining them.

[marcnyc]

I had already, before all of this, formatted the drives and named them differently...
by the way, I formatted them both Mac OS Journaled, is that fine? or should I have chosen a different formatting format?

[JDV]

That shouldn't make any difference. I still rather believe that for some reason the termination on the drives is getting confused when daisy chained. FireWire has more similarities to SCSI connectors than most realize.

Joe VanZandt

[marcnyc]

is there any way I can find out? if I open the cases will I see jumpers with IDs 1 to 9?

[JDV]

I honestly don't know, but I don't THINK it is manged with physical jumpers. But if the case is easy to open, it might be worth a look. Out of curiousity, have you been able to identify the manufacturer of the enclosure? Is it Samsung?

Joe VanZandt

[marcnyc]

It looks like the manufacturer is a company called "XtraStor" and the drives are Samsung.

[JDV]

I didn't have any luck finding anything about XtraStor, either. But they are a fairly inexpensive enclosure. If you got a good deal on e-Bay, you best bet might be to buy a couple of better encloures (preferably ones using a better chipset) and just swap the drives from these enclosures to better ones. The drives themselves don't care. This looks like a standard ATA drive enclosure, so the drives are probably ATA drives. Just find a good enclosure deal and do it. It's doubtful that any amount of fiddling is likely to get these enclosures to behave together.

Joe VanZandt

[marcnyc]

Thanks.
I actually already bought a 2-bay FireWire enclosure. I'll loose the USB2 connectivity, but I'll also loose two cumbersome power supplies...
I hope it has better chipset!

[marcnyc]

UPDATE:
I got my 2-bay FireWire 400 enclosure from ebay (with Oxford chipset)
I put both drives in and the same thing happened, so now I am thinking that I was too quick when blaming the cheap cases.
So it turns out that both drives had their jumpers set onto master. I didn't know that could be an issue or didn't know that drives came like that (I'd think they come set to slaves from the factory)...
Then I realized something: the XtraStor factory box mentions on the outside that that box can only be used in Master Mode and that there for IDE drives would have to be set to Master.
I guess that explains it all...
Wish I had know before...

[JDV]

Well, you had plenty of help coming to the wrong conclusion, for which I'm quite sorry. An IDE drive will normally come from the factory jumpered as a master because it will be assumed that it is to be a single-drive setup. But I must say that if I had had to guess, I would have guessed that both drives SHOULD be jumpered as masters in a firewire array--and been wrong. So, tell me, how did you end up jumpering the drives that got it to work? I didn't know the FireWire controller distinguished master and slave drives. If you wanted to add yet a third drive to the string, I wonder how it would be jumpered? Or is it worse than that...did you not get them to chain at all?

Joe VanZandt

[marcnyc]

I bought a 2 bay firewire case from ebay so they both mount at the same time when you turn the case on. Along with the bulkier footprint, that is the only disadvantage of having this 2 bay case. I use drive A mostly to work and B mostly to back up to so, B will shorten its life span by just running all the time I use A, even if I never go to B, which is why I unmount B from the finder as soon as I turn the unit on.
To answer your question I jumpered A as master (left it unchanged) and B as slave. It was the only thing I could think of so I just did it and tried (following the instructions on the HD itself). I also had gotten a clue about this from the fact that the FireWare case came with instructions that pointe out that one of the two ribbon cable (the black one) is for the master drive and the other one (the gray) is for the slave. I guess it does matter in the FW world after all...

[passingby]

I don't own a mac, but as this topic turned up near the top of a Google search and I wanted to share my experience with this problem *somewhere*, I'm posting it here. I won't be coming back, so read carefully...

I also ran into this behaviour with some Prolific PL-3507 based enclosures on a Windows system. I dug into it, searched the net far and wide, experimented, put 2 and 2 together, and came up with a hypothesis.

Two big clues were (1) a posting on the Coolmax forum, and (2) the following entry from one of the readme's for Prolific firmware.
02/24/2003 -
1. Fix the problem of 'Unique ID with 1394 Serial No.'
For two or more same PL-3507 IDE device on the same 1394 bus, the EUID64 should be unique.
The 1394 Serial No. is now used in the EEPROM to construct the unique EUID64 bytes (64bits = 8 bytes).
bytes #0 ~2 : Company ID (00 50 77 for Prolific)
bytes #3 : Device Type (HD/CD-ROM/DVD/MO...)
bytes #4~7 : 1394 Serial No. (modified by PL3507 EEPROM Writor)

Note: Must use PL-3507 EEPROM Writer V 0.0.0.6.

Of course this "EEPROM Writer" was nowhere to be found. But in the process of doing a firmware update, I noted that the updater utility had an option to save the current firmware to a ".bin" file. To make a long story short, what I eventually figured out is that this .bin file included everything, INCLUDING THE SECTION WITH THE "1394 Serial No." above. I further determined that this Serial No. was IDENTICAL on all my enclosures. The manufacturer had NOT serialized the chips. (This is like buying several ethernet boards, all with the same mac address assigned - a no-no.)

On a hunch, I used a hex editor and modified the serial number in the .bin file, and reflashed the firmware. Low and behold now my system 'saw' that enclosure at the same time as one of the unmodified enclosures!

My hunch was confirmed - the top portion of the flash is used to hold data, including this serial number. The normal firmware updates do not disturb this portion, but if you update with the previously saved .bin file, it allows you to overwrite the entire flash, including this data.

So for people with improperly serialized PL-3507 based enclosures, there is a way to 'fix' this, if you are sufficiently brave and willing to manually patch your firmware image.

Get the firmware updater. The current version is at
http://www.prolific.com.tw/support/files//IDE%20Storage/PL-3507/Firmware/fw_pl3507B_d042006.zip
The zip includes both the most recent firmware and the updater utility. Please note the following from Prolific web-site:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

fw_pl3507B_d042006.zip 2006/5/19 108 KB

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PL-3507B Firmware Update
F/W Version: 2006.04.20.149 [Checksum 4D6F]
For Chip B and above versions only (w/ ICP Support)
Warning: This firmware is intended ONLY for Prolific customers and not for end-users. If you are an end-user and still want to use this, use at your own risk. Use ICP v2.0.4 and firmware 09/22/2004 first if your current firmware is older than 04/10/2003.

1) Update your flash to the current version using this.
2) Use the updater to save a copy of your flash to a .bin file.
3) Using a hex editor on the .bin, look after offset 0x7400 for the above signature - 00 50 77
4) The next byte is the device type, the next four bytes are the serial number.
5) Patch the serial number (increment one of the bytes)
6) Save the modified .bin
7) Use the firmware updater to reflash, using the .bin file

Do this for each of your enclosures, giving each a unique serial number.

Now they should ALL be recognized!

[rpmasson]

Wow, great work passingby. Yep, it turns out that the el-cheapo enclosures are all flashed with the same EUID64. This is easily verifiable on a mac by mounting each one separately and use system profiler to examine the device details - the "Globally Unique Identifier" is the same (hence the loose use of the term "Globally Unique.." :)

I bought both of mine off of ebay from premiertek - I've emailed them about the problem but don't expect much response (or at best to see the prolific.tw web site). Unfortunately, the EEPROM writer software doesn't seem to work under Vista - my only Windows system. So I'm kind of stuck.

Bottom line: I would NOT recommend these Prolific XtraStor USB/1394 Hard Drive External Enclosures unless you're SURE you'll only use one.
Bobski