Mac Mini + Firewire 400 drive = problems

[synagence]

I've recently migrated my iTunes library onto a firewire 400 drive, namely a iomega ego 500gb drive.

Previously it was on a Freecom USB2 drive... i never had problems with the USB but thought the firewire would yield better performance for hosting the VM's i use and overall disk performance...

Problem i have is that periodically the drive just seems to unmount without warning.... its happened about 6 or 7 times...
I have formatted the drive as a Journalled drive so i'm hoping i won't be in danger of corruption ...

Is there anything i can check (similar to the windows event viewer?) to see why this is happening? I'm relatively new to mac problem diagnosis ... this is actually the 1st time i've encountered a problem since i got the mac.

 

[barkmonster]

I'm not sure fi this will help but it might work with firewire drives too...

System Preferences > Energy Saver

Un-check the box that says "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible

 

[synagence]

Un-check?

It is currently checked but i have had 2 USB2 drives connected for 8 months without a single failure .... its only started happening to this new firewire drive...

The only thing that concerns me is that this eGo drive seems to run hot... might be the cause of the problem?

 

[sickmacdoc]

Just to clarify one thing- in your first post you mentioned the drive unmounting. Do you mean it is just powering down or truly unmounting (which would require you to go into Disk Utility and remount it or unplug and replug the drive's FW cable)?

If it is just powering down (and then spin up to speed when the next read or write request is sent to the drive) that is often a function of the firmware in the external drive's enclosure independent of any Mac settings regarding Energy Savings, so that is why I ask. I don't know specifically about the Iomega drives, but for an example the Western Digital MyBook drives have that as a "feature" according to the WD Knowledgebase and the behavior cannot be changed by the user.

It drove me so crazy on some MyBooks (spinning down after about 5 mins) that I made a little automator script to copy a little file to each drive about every 3 minutes to keep them from spinning down. Later I just tore the drives out of them and put them in a multi drive case and tossed the enclosures instead.

 

[synagence]

Its not disappearing due to inactivity .... i can be in the middle of a movie or anything and it'll just halt and the drive drops out from the system (not in disk utility) so i have to unplug it and plug back in ...

I'm thinking its a heat problem ... i've seen a few reviews on amazon talking about this model running hot .... i'll be really annoyed if the drive can't tolerate being on all the time .. i'm gonna talk to iomega support on Monday

 

[sickmacdoc]

Well in that case, I would tend to agree. With a little luck maybe you just got one that is running even hotter than normal and is kicking in the thermal protection circuitry. Good luck and I hope Iomega gets this handled quickly for you!

 

[synagence]

Ok ... now i'm confused...
My automatic backup ran last night and clearly had failed due to the drive again ... today i copied my itunes library back off the firewire drive and onto the USB drive (around 200Gb), then i ran drive genius benchmarks on the drive for an hour ... then i ran a full sector scan of the drive ....

All these operations worked flawlessly.... no errors and no lockups ...

So i've ran the drive for about 6 or 7 hours today of complete IO without break and its working ....