On Tuesday, December 2, 2003, at 05:56 PM, David R. wrote:
Hey all,
I think I've isolated a serious problem on my s900. I just bought a new
laptop size USB 2.0 Firewire drive enclosure. They are designed to be able
to run directly off the bus power. I also just bought a new USB 2.0 PCI
card a few weeks ago . Well, when I tried the new mini enclosure on my
s900, it wouldn't even light up the drive when hooked firewire. When I
hooked usb, it was able to copy a small file but when I tried a larger one,
it just pooped out and stalled the machine forcing a restart. So today in
order to verify the enclosure was working fine, I tested both busses on a
friends G4 AGP and EMAC. It works like a champ and copied 4 gigs in just 10
minutes using ONLY the bus power.
So it would seem that I am having some form of power supply problem.
snips taken....
Well since no one else is answering I'll give this a shot. This will just be based on my general guessing...
Until recent times Macs had fairly small Power supplies. Most Apple machines has 150 watt power supplies(sometimes smaller). I believe without checking that the Umax S900/J700 is 200 watts. Only the Power Tower Pro came with a decent power supply of I think 250 watts. It really doesn't take all that many add ons to use it up. My own machine J700 with 4 PCi cards and 3 IDE hard drives and 1 CD player ran fine but things slowed down noticeably when I added a DVD to the case. In fact i was worried my power supply was dying so removed the CD player and things went back to normal. Ordered a new power supply but well over a year later haven't needed the new supply. Works fine as long as I don't add the 5th drive.
The machines you tested in are both much newer machines with USB and firewire built in I'd think. A number of external USB and firewire drives say right on the box made for machines with built in ports. (firewire or USB) I'm going to guess our old machines with add on USB and Firewire cards may not be up to the task of PCI bus powering some external drives which pull more power then say something really small. The fix for our machines would be a Powered hub! OWC and likely others have a dual Firewire & USB powered hub.
I also seem to remember you moving to another machine when you had firewire problems before and it didn't work either. Seems unlikely 2 machines would have the same defect. I'd go with the powered hub.
I do have a beige G3 here I could throw everything into but I wouldn't be
able to use my G4 Sonnet card or my XLR8 carrier with G3. Unfortunately the
Beige only has a 266 cpu in it so right now so that may not be a viable
alternative. So I guess I need to make the s900 well again.
Thanks
Dave
Well in several ways the Umax machine is a more versatile machine then the Beige G3. More PCI slots and more room for drives and better air flow. Also currently fully supported in Panther while many of the Apple machines still have issues ;-) You could pull the G3 Zif off that Carrier card and plug it directly into the beige G3 . The beige g3 has a jumper block on the motherboard for setting bus and multiplier speeds. I could dig up a chart if needed. Will S
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