I recently bought a Crucial 240 GB SSD. I installed Mavericks on it and used it as my startup disk for a number of weeks in an external Rosewill USB2 dock without any problems. I now have it installed in a MacAlly 2.5" firewire enclosure.

It works fine when it's the only drive connected to the firewire port on the back of my Mac. When I daisy chain it with two other Firewire 800 drives (that worked fine previously) the Crucial drive will hang with a white screen/spinning gear at startup. I can usually get it started by holding down the option key and choosing the drive when I restart. I also had problems with applications suddenly quitting or not launching at all. I've tried various cable combinations with the drives in different order, but still have problems starting up. After startup, disk utility says everything is OK and I also zapped the pram which didn't seem to help.

Would this indicate the enclosure is bad since I cannot daisy chain additional drives? When everything is working, I'm very happy with the new SSD's speed - it's like having a new Mac.

TIA

---

Northern California Coast

Yeah, I wold guess that it's the enclosure.

Are the other FW800 drives 2.5" bus powered enclosures or 3.5" self-powered? If you have multiple bus-powered enclosures, you've probably exceeded the power limit.

Quote
Gareth
Are the other FW800 drives 2.5" bus powered enclosures or 3.5" self-powered? If you have multiple bus-powered enclosures, you've probably exceeded the power limit.

Both are self-powered 3.5" enclosures. Also, when I have the drive attached alone, either of its FW ports seem to work fine.

---

Northern California Coast



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2014 03:03PM by steve....

Plenty of flaky FW800 enclosures out there. I never could get my dégagé one to work.

I would not suspect the SSD. Except that it might be drawing a fair bit of juice.

I vote enclosure too, I had a MacAlly fail on me recently although it was a FW 400 model with very little use

You might try chaining only one drive at a time through the MacAlly to see whether the problem occurs with a particular combination of drives. It's conceivable that it's a firmware issue or ID problem between two enclosures.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2014 05:53PM by Chakravartin.

Quote
Chakravartin
You might try chaining only one drive at a time through the MacAlly to see whether the problem occurs with a particular combination of drives. It's conceivable that it's a firmware issue or ID problem between two enclosures.

I tried doing this but the startup problem exists with each individual drive. One of the drives has an on/off switch and if I have it connected and the switch off (end of chain), it starts OK. I can then switch it on after booting and everything seems normal.

I've contacted Macally but have not yet heard back from them.

---

Northern California Coast

Does the Macally have two FW800 ports, or just one? It seems most likely a bus power draw issue.

It has two.

It's this one: Macally 2.5" enclosure

---

Northern California Coast