Firewire, B&W G3 & OS X.2

jwennet

jwennet

Registered
I have noticed that the firewire performance on my B&W G3 400 (recently up processor to G4 400) has been sluggish and slow to respond since I have upgraded from OS 9.2.2 to OS X.2 (and above). It wasn't too bad when using an external firewire hard drive (Maxtor 3000 DV), but rather when trying to burn Data and music CD with Toast 5.2.1 and QPS QueFire! 8x4x32 cdr-w. I would and still get buffer underrun errors, even after making adjustments to cache size and burning at slower speeds (this drive doesn't offer buffer underrun protection). However, in after rebooting in OS 9.2, the burner worker as it should, at full burn speed. I sent e-mails to both Roxio and QPS tech support. Below is what I received from QPS and thought I would share it.

"Many of our customers have seen similar issues with their firewire drives on B&W G3 systems after upgrading to 10.2. It looks like the problem is a communication issue between the firewire support in the new version OS X and the old firewire controllers that were used on the firewire ports on these units.
You may be able to get around this by attaching the drive to a firewire pci card since then the drive would run off of the firewire controllers on the card instead of the ones on the motherboard. We have not tested this yet, but a few of our customers have said it worked for them, so it may be a work around for the problem. The firewire cards they have had the most success with use Texas Instrument chipsets."

Maybe someone out there can help me work around this "work around" with have me to spend any more money on upgrades.

Thanks, J
 
Did you get the OS Update 10.2.5? That added support to several firewire CDRW's.
 
Toast recognizes my drive just fine. It just underruns at any speed. Even the firewire is slow to respond. Here is what tech support had written me about this issue.

"Many of our customers have seen similar issues with their firewire drives on B&W G3 systems after upgrading to 10.2. It looks like the problem is a communication issue between the firewire support in the new version OS X and the old firewire controllers that were used on the firewire ports on these units.
You may be able to get around this by attaching the drive to a firewire pci card since then the drive would run off of the firewire controllers on the card instead of the ones on the motherboard. We have not tested this yet, but a few of our customers have said it worked for them, so it may be a work around for the problem. The firewire cards they have had the most success with use Texas Instrument chipsets."

With all the upgrades I'm doing, I might as well get a new computer. Oh well, thanks for the reply.

J
 
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