The Great FireWire Adventure
posted on august 10, 2004, tag: tech
My primary computer is a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5. When I bought it almost a year ago, it was the top of the line machine—it has only recently been ousted by the Dual 2.5GHz model—and it's packed with great features and technology. One of the surprising things, however, is its lack of FireWire ports.
Apple developed FireWire and has been one of its biggest proponents. Since the Blue & White Power Mac G3 (released in 1999), Apple has included FireWire ports in most of its computers. My PC has two ports and I've never used them. Each of my Macs has had at least two ports and they've always been full.
I currently have my iPod dock, my iSight and two LaCie FW hard drives. The two HDDs have an extra pass-through port to allow daisy chaining, but even if I were to utilize both ports (which I'm not) I would still be left with two devices to plug in (one hard drive plugged into the other, the iPod dock plugged into that, leaving the iSight and the first drive). The problem? The G5 only has two FireWire 400 ports, and one is in the front. Could someone please explain this to me? This was a $3,000 machine. Top of the line. Fast, fully featured, et cetera. And yet, it has only two FW ports. I don't understand this at all.
None the less, I decided to purchase a PCI expansion card to add some ports to my machine. I picked up a Belkin 3-port card and tossed it into the machine. Perfect, now I have room for all of my devices. Well, time to go to work, better sleep my machine. Hey... what the hell? Why won't you go to sleep? Man, your fans are spinning even faster than before! What are you doing? Oh, you're not sleeping because OS X doesn't support deep sleep with any 3rd party FW PCI card installed. Fantastic! I rely on deep sleep during the summer because my office doesn't have an air conditioner in it and when I am at work during the day it gets very hot and my G5 doesn't need to be on. But I also don't want to shutdown and turn on my machine every morning and evening. A Mac which cannot deep sleep is a broken Mac.
After trying a few different cards (I learned "no cards work" fact after all this trial and error), I finally gave up and bought a Belkin 6-port FireWire hub* at the lovely high price of $70. That's right. $3,000 machine, iPod, iSight, et cetera, and I had to spend an additional $70 just to be able to use the devices with my "top of the line" machine. Kind of silly if you ask me.
But now it's working. The machine deep sleeps and all is well in the world once again. That's why, for the love of everything that is good and holy, I will not install the recent 10.3.5 system update on my G5 until these reported sleep issues are fixed. After all that nonsense getting my machine in working order, I'm not going to ruin it all with an update that breaks what I've just fixed.
Update: It seems the problem I linked to above only affects single processor 1.8GHz G5s. I'm still going to give it a little bit of time, though.
* It's worth noting that calling this hub a 6-port hub is false advertising. While it's true that the hub has 6 ports, Belkin claims you can "connect six FireWire devices," but fails to mention that one of those devices is your computer. You can actually only attach 5 devices. They should really call it a 5-port hub.
Comments
There are 11 comments, comments are closed
David on 08/10/2004:
It seems false advertising is on the wild these days, at least on Belkin Company. I recently bought an advertised 6 ports USB hub, which is a 5 ports one, just as your FireWire.
Hmm, perhaps I should write something to them...
Quentin Hill on 08/10/2004:
At least your computer wasn't rendered obsolete 3 months after you bought it.
I own one of the very first G4s ever made (I even have a letter from the G4 design team thanking me). Of course, a month after I placed my order, they stopped taking orders of the first generation (Yikes motherboard), then two months later they announced the second generation G4s (with the Sawtooth mother boards).
Brian Fox on 08/10/2004:
Don't forget, Apple added a FireWire 800 port to your machine, so you have 2 FireWire 400 ports [one on the front though] and 1 FireWire 800 port.
Even if you don't have a FireWire 800 device, you can use a good cheap cable to go from FW800 to FW400 for around $5.
[A quick google search yielded this: http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=FW6P9P-2M-BLK&cat=CBL ]
Andreas Jakopec on 08/10/2004:
hi,
i was having the exact problem. now there's a firewire-card somewhere in the basement which i cannot really use! so i really agree on your opinions...
Mathew Hoy on 08/10/2004:
you're right re: the false advertising. startech.com does it all the time as well (who position themselves to be belkin's chief rival). i also hate when you buy a 4-port usb card and one of the ports is on the card itself (something startech did all the time). who the heck is going to open their comp to plug in a device or 2?
and don't get me started on their hella-shitty usb hubs. ugh!
Marco J. Campos on 08/10/2004:
http://www.barefeats.com/fire45.html
Check it out and look for the part about Firewire 800 ports problems that come with the G5's...
PS: Sorry about the "strange" English...i'm portuguese...:p
Shawn on 08/11/2004:
Wait a minute... couldn't you do this:
F400 1 > Drive 1 > Drive 2 > iPod
F400 2 > iSight
Is the reason for not doing that simply avoiding using the front one? I forget. Cause that would work. Though you can't buy any more firewire devices...
Garrett on 08/11/2004:
Yeah, I definitely don't want one of my constant peripherals plugged into the front of my machine. I use that port for the camera when editing or something else random and temporary like that.
Timen on 08/12/2004:
Get the little FW 800 to 2 FW 400 plugs. Don't they exist?
Narayan on 08/16/2004:
I bought one of those hubs when they first came out and firmly believe it saved me from a logic board replacement. The early TiBooks had flaky firewire ports which would short out if you looked at them strangely, and several of my friends had to have their Tis' logic boards replaced.
My firewire hub is full and I'm considering getting a another one. The 5/6 port deal was indeed a bummer, but the convenience of that front port makes up for the misleading advertising, IMHO. You could always look into a HubZilla!
C. Sailfish on 04/14/2005:
I agree with the absurdity of Apple producing professional level computers and supplying them with 2 Firewire and two USB ports. To make matters worse when I complain to them and ask them to recommend a third party product that is compatible they decline. I have been going through hell for the last four months trying to find a compatible USB 2.0 card. I'm on a Dual 2.5 with 4GB RAM. So far I've tried Sonnet(both Tango Combo card and Allegro USB cards and with both my machine won't wake from sleep. Anyone have anything tested that works?