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LaCie drives causing OS issues
I’ve never heard of anything like this before. But here is what I’m dealing with. I have two LaCie D2 Quadra 3TB drives connected via firewire to a brand-new (only two weeks old) iMac running OS X 10.7.2. I keep experiencing hangups on my system because of the drives. Particularly on startup. When I turn my computer on and the login screen shows up, my keyboard is not responsive. But once I unplug the drives or turn them off, the keyboard suddenly works. The drives will show in my finder but there were two instances where they could not be accessed. Disk Utility showed them as active. But when I opened the finder window, the spinning wheel happened and didn’t stop until I unplugged them. And startup seems to take about 30 seconds longer with the drives plugged in versus the drives unplugged.
I have a feeling the suggestions will be to call LaCie and talk to tech support. But does anyone have any suggestions other than that? And I’m not using any of the LaCie software and they are formatted for Mac.
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9 Replies
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I’m guessing cable length. Commands hangings will cause lots of weird stuff. Look in /var/log/kernel.log
Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications -
I’m using the cables that came with the drives. So they’re probably only a couple of feet long. How do I navigate to that log?
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In a terminal, type:
cd /var/log
Then type:
open .
This will open a finder. Then open kernel.log with a text editor and see what’s at the bottom when this is going on. There might be driver errors. Cable length is one possibility.
Steve
Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications -
Well I accessed the console and the kernel.log but I don’t really know what to do with all of that information now.
I’m not an IT guy or computer engineer. Just an editor that is really getting annoyed with this problem. I’ve put in a support ticket to LaCie and I’m waiting to hear back from them.
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Have the exact same issue in Snow Leopard (10.6.8). Tried many different cables and configurations (daisy-chain/direct/different cables/lengths/colors, Disk Util format/Lacie drive app format, running with/without Lacie desktop manager – just what I want…another app running all-the-time!, etc, etc.) I have other fire-wire drives on the same Mac (i.e. daisy-chain) working flawlessly. I contacted Lacie and after suggesting most of the things I had already tried, they wanted to set-up a return/replacement. The drive seems to work fine as long as it’s turned-off during boot and I have neither the time nor desire to play “mail-tag” with Lacie for a month. I just won’t buy another one. It’s a shame, I thought they had a good reputation, and maybe they do? I’ve had many fire-wire drives on many Macs over the past decade and none have needed babysitting like this one. (…SCSI: ON before boot, Lacie: OFF before boot…got it! I think.)
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Mine work correctly now. What LaCie did for me was send me a firmware update for the drives. The new LaCie drives have a power-save feature. However that feature cannot be disabled with the software LaCie uses. So the new firmware they sent me disabled the power-save function and now they work perfectly.
In my opinion, power-save is a good feature. However we as editors need our drives running a full speed to get the most out of them. Power-save should be a function we can turn on and off, like on computers. It should not be built permanently into the drive itself.
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I had a similar issue with the new LaCie D2 drives, as soon as I figured out that they were in permanent power save mode I returned them. I still have several D2 Quadras from before these new ones were released, which never had a problem.
Good to know there is a firmware update to fix the problem, thanks for posting!
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I did update the firmware. I did not know of a specific power-save-disabling version. I will look into it. Thanks for the post/info.
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You may have to ask LaCie for that firmware update because I did not see it on their website.
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