Sharing Firewire 400 between an external HDD and burner on an MBP

[afultz075]

I have 2 Western Digital MyBook HDDs and an OWC Firewire DVD-RW drive linked together, running on the Firewire 400 connection on my MBP.

On one of the HDDs, I keep ripped copies of part of my DVD collection. I normally make a backup of my DVDs using this external burner and Toast 8. Some of my DVD rips will burn straight to the disc without compressing while others require compression (I have it set that compressed DVD files get transfered to my MBPs HD before burning and then deleted after burning, so the external burner is not taking data off the Mybook it shares a Firewire connection with).

Whenever a DVD file requires no compression, it will burn straight to disc off data on the MyBook that the burner shares a connection with. Here is where I have problems. Toast seems to lock up after the DVD is only several % completed.

Am I simply asking too much of a Firewire 400 connection? When I run the burner off of USB I have no issues. I like to use as many Firewire 400 devices as I can since I can daisy-chain them together and not take up precious few USB ports.

 

[gr8tfly]

You can get a FW800 to FW400 adapter cable (9-pin to 6-pin) and run the FW400 device off the MBP's 800 port.

(something like this: http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=164598)

 

[afultz075]

That would be a good idea.

Another concern of mine, does this mean that when i'm burning off of the Firewire drive that I can do nothing involving my MyBooks at all? I've been thinking of moving my Itunes collection to one of the external drives, but I wouldn't want to if even playing music off one of the drives would freeze up the burner.

 

[OllyW]

I've got a similar set up with my Mac mini. I have a Lacie external HD and a Pioneer DVR-112D drive mounted in a cheap external enclosure with both connected by FW400 to the mini through a Belkin hub.

Burning DVDs from ISO files or Disk Images stored on the Lacie HD using Toast 8 give excellent results. I get burning speeds between 7x - 16x, depending on the blank media used.

Don't forget to tick the Enable Buffer Underrun Prevention box in the Advanced tab of Recorder Settings in Toast.

 

[afultz075]

I'll have to try buffer underrun prevention next time.

Do you get similar locking-up when it's turned off?

 

[OllyW]

I'll have to try buffer underrun prevention next time.

Do you get similar locking-up when it's turned off?

I burned a couple of coasters when the data couldn't keep up with the burner.

I haven't scrapped a disc since I enabled it.

 

[afultz075]

Great! I'll have to try that.

 

[afultz075]

Damn, I still keep getting lockups in Toast even with Buffer Underrun prevention enabled. Guess I'll have to run this USB. Any other ideas?

 

[acadiel]

Damn, I still keep getting lockups in Toast even with Buffer Underrun prevention enabled. Guess I'll have to run this USB. Any other ideas?

I'm running into the same issue.

I recently bought a WD MyBook Premium 1TB (I run it in RAID 1/500GB mode). I have it hooked up with FW 800. On my MBP's FW400 port, I have an OWC Mercury Elite DVDRW drive. When I try to Toast stuff from the MyBook to the OWC drive (FW800->FW400), it locks up after several % complete, and I wind up having to force quit. However, if I unhook the MyBook and burn from the internal HD to the OWC drive, it burns fine. I can also burn from the MyBook to the Internal DVD burner (which is quite slow.)

If you figure out what's going on, let me know. I'd like to run my stuff over FireWire because of the daisy chaining ability, however, these two devices just don't seem to like each other.