FW800 in El Cap?

[Oldmanmac]

Someone told me their FW drives did not work on EC. Is that true for everyone?

 

[Alrescha]

FW devices verified (by me) to work in El Capitan:

Drobo Gen 2 (USB/FW800)
Elgato EyeTV 500 (FW400)
newerTech miniStack v4(?) (USB3/FW800)
Sony DRX-500ULX (USB/FW400)

A.

 

[BrettApple]

I've got a 2TB FW800 external hard drive plugged into my 2007 iMac running El Capitan right now. I'm playing my iTunes library off of it so it is definitely working.

I've also got a Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter for some AVL equipment at the church, it also works just fine on a 2015 rMBP.

 

[dogslobber]

Someone told me their FW drives did not work on EC. Is that true for everyone?

No.

 

[DeltaMac]

Don't believe everything people tell you (and try not to trust the internet for much, either! Sure, like that would happen!)
I have an Iomega firewire external, with 17 partitions. It's my primary installer storage. I can install all OS X versions from 10.4 to 10.11 - with a variety of different basic system boot partitions. It works just fine from El Cap.

 

[Alrescha]

I have an Iomega firewire external, with 17 partitions. It's my primary installer storage. I can install all OS X versions from 10.4 to 10.11 - with a variety of different basic system boot partitions.

Well done! I'm jealous.

A.

 

[treekram]

I also have an Iomega external Firewire and a DAT Optic disk array, where I put my old PATA drives and use as backup for some videos - all hooked up to my 2012 Mini. They work fine. There was somebody a while back on the forums who had problems with a Firewire external drive in El Capitan but the problems went away on its own. Maybe the same will happen with the person who's having issues.

 

[Gochugogi]

Someone told me their FW drives did not work on EC. Is that true for everyone?

My Mini i7 has a single FW800 and it works fine with my last remaining FW drive (OWC) under 10.11. I use it to backup a USB external every week or so. The FW800 port also works a treat with my ancient (2006) MOTU Ultralite.

 

[Fishrrman]

Some people are having trouble with Firewire-based audio interfaces and scanners with El Capitan.

Opening a search engine and entering "firewire deprecated el capitan" yields plenty of instances.

Here is some text from an article I archived:
==================
Note: Literally the second I filed this column, I received an email from Apogee Electronics stating that its Ensemble hardware, an expensive and highly regarded audio interface, will not be supported on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. This interface was discontinued less than three years ago and cost roughly $2,500 new. I own one. It used to be that when you bought expensive audio production hardware, you expected more than a few years of use.

But don't be so quick to blame Apogee. With El Capitan, Apple has discontinued development and maintenance of its FireWire Core Audio driver, which will cause problems with a huge number of other hardware devices as well.
source:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2988096/mac-os-x/sorry-unix-fans-os-x-el-capitan-kills-root.html
==================

I have an external firewire400 drive I've used with El Capitan (even booted using it for a while), along with a couple of firewire800 backup drives, and all still run well enough...

 

[Oldmanmac]

Ok, I'll press on then. Didn't want to have to go back on OS
s.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Someone told me their FW drives did not work on EC. Is that true for everyone?

Not true. I use two InXtron/Akitio SK-3500 HDD enclosures. One uses the Oxford Semiconductor OXUF934DSB and the other uses the Oxford Semiconductor OXUF924DSB SATA<-->FW800 bridge chip. No problems.

After some ejection problems with ASMedia ASM1153e enclosures (USB 3.0<-->SATA III bridge chip, zero OS X and zero Windows issues usually) I disabled the following power management setting (via Terminal):

sudo pmset -a autopoweroff 0

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/pmset.1.html

autopoweroff - Where supported, enabled per default as an implementation of Lot 6 to the European
Energy-related Products Directive. After sleeping for <autopoweroffdelay> minutes, the system will
write a hibernation image and go into a lower power chipset sleep. Wakeups from this state will take
longer than wakeups from regular sleep. The system will not auto power off if any external devices are
connected, if the system is on battery power, or if the system is bound to a network and wake for net-work network
work access is enabled.

Both SATA<-->FW800 bridge chips have firmware which support what Apple calls "Autonomous Spin Down", so that the default autopoweroff 1 setting is superfluous.

 

[simon lefisch]

Literally the second I filed this column, I received an email from Apogee Electronics stating that its Ensemble hardware, an expensive and highly regarded audio interface, will not be supported on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. This interface was discontinued less than three years ago and cost roughly $2,500 new. I own one. It used to be that when you bought expensive audio production hardware, you expected more than a few years of use.

I run a Digi 002r using drivers that were made for 10.8.x and it still works (surprisingly).