I'm not sure what i'm missing here but I've got two 300gb Seagates hooked up to my mac using USB 2.0. I now ned those ports for something else so i was going to hook them up via Firewire...

Problem:

When I connect one drive via Firewire...nothing happens. Mac doesn't detect them and place them on the desktop like the USB.

Also each drive has the capability to dazy chain them so I also tried hooking up the 2nd to the 1st and then connecting it to the Mac...same problem as above (not that I expected it to work that way if it didn't work alone)

my question is:

What am i missing? Is there an option to enable HDD support via firewire or am i doing something wrong here?

10/21/2007 1:56:03 PM

hmmm...wierd...they work now...nvm

delete/lock

10/21/2007 2:02:07 PM

maybe your chain is too dazy

10/21/2007 2:34:47 PM

Be careful chaining the drives if you've got them in el cheapo enclosures. One of the companies that made a USB/firewire combo chip that was used in pretty much all of the really cheap enclosures in the 2005-2006 time frame had a problem with the firewire firmware that caused data integrity problems if multiple drives in the chain were accessed simultaneously or a large amount of data is transfered at once.

I don't remember who made the USB/FW interface thing, I just know I have one of the affected enclosures.

10/21/2007 2:54:32 PM

looks like you got it working, but I got a Seagate 100GB 2.5" for my Mac Mini. Plugged in externally through one USB, the Mac didn't even see it. The drive worked fine on my PC and on my wife's Mac Book, but my Mac Mini couldn't see it. Turns out the Mac Mini USB ports are pretty weak, so I had to get an external enclosure with 2 USB cables on it, then you just plug the external drive into two USB ports, and it works fine.

10/21/2007 4:08:43 PM

what version of OS X are you using, in one of the latest updates a lot of people noticed that their firewire ext drives no longer are recognized. Solution is to role back the firewire settings to pre-update. google around and you'll find instructions

10/21/2007 8:53:04 PM

The drive I have is a Seagate 300gb...it isn't an internal drive I bought an enclosure for if thats what you guys meant. I had one of those before and it sucked lol...I dunno if this helps anyone having this same problem...but what i did was power off the drives and unplug them for a few minutes then plugged them back in and held the "back-up" button on the front of the drive down for a few seconds...dunno if that actually did anything (Because I've never used them before) or if it was just unplugging the drives and reseting them.

10/22/2007 10:25:12 AM