disconnecting hardware mac

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Golden

Golden

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how do i disconnect a firewire interface from my mac... ? just pull the firewire cable out of the port?

I'm new to the mac. Remembering the PC days of "it's safe to remove hardware"....

what to do? :confused:

is there a method?
 
you're supposed to be able to plug and unplug firewire devices when they're on, but I usually turn off the interface before unplugging anyway.
 
ok, thanks. I've got a duet and there's no on/off switch... I guess it's a ripper!
 
Yes the pleasure of a mac is being able to just plug things in and out whenever! Wouldn't life be great if everything was like that ;)
 
Uhm...my Mac stuff says not to. CDR, HD, ProjectMix. I don't think it's a good idea at all.
 
I agree, not a good idea to hot swap firewire devices. Especially if there are external hard drives also connected. I've had major problems with drive corruption by hot swapping, even though technically you are supposed to be able to do it.
 
If your going to unplug a firewire device, make sure you eject it first. For instance, when I remove my external FW harddrive, I grab the icon of the disk on my desktop and drag to the trash before I physically remove the firewire cable from my G5. The trash bin icon should turn into an eject icon when you grab the disk icon. I'm not sure if this is necessary with Firewire audio interfaces or not, may depend on the interface. My MOTU 828mkII doesn't require this, I just shut off the interface and it disappears from my dock.
 
Hotswap is hotswap. As long as you make sure nothing is using the device when you unplug it you shouldn't have any problems.
 
timthetortoise said:
Hotswap is hotswap. As long as you make sure nothing is using the device when you unplug it you shouldn't have any problems.
Click to expand...

"Shouldn't" is right. But I've had hard drives get fried by hot swapping peripherals on the same or different firewire buss. What they say in the advertising and what happens in the real world are often two different things.

So always err on the side of caution. Unmount the device first, then power it down, then remove it.
 
I'm using the apogee duet. anyone else? anyone know how to shut it off for the night?

there's no physical on/off button and there's nothing to drag into the trash... The only icon I can find is for the maestro software... so, what do I do?
 
don't unplug drives before unmounting, but there's no reason why you can't just unplug a firewire interface. I do it all the time without even restarting my interface and it works perfectly, and has for years =D

Even unplugging a drive before unmounting, while isn't recomended, has never caused me any issues... but, it's good practice to do that anyway.
 
Golden said:
I'm using the apogee duet. anyone else? anyone know how to shut it off for the night?

there's no physical on/off button and there's nothing to drag into the trash... The only icon I can find is for the maestro software... so, what do I do?
Click to expand...

keep it on, or unplug it :) there's no reason why you'd have to shut it off in my opinion, my 896HD, speakers and controller keyboard are always on.
 
SonicAlbert said:
"Shouldn't" is right. But I've had hard drives get fried by hot swapping peripherals on the same or different firewire buss. What they say in the advertising and what happens in the real world are often two different things.

So always err on the side of caution. Unmount the device first, then power it down, then remove it.
Click to expand...

I don't want to come across rude, but you ARE using a PC, running windows (right?).. I've never heard of that happening with a mac.
 
TerraMortim said:
I don't want to come across rude, but you ARE using a PC, running windows (right?).. I've never heard of that happening with a mac.
Click to expand...

SonicAlbert said:
I agree, not a good idea to hot swap firewire devices. Especially if there are external hard drives also connected. I've had major problems with drive corruption by hot swapping, even though technically you are supposed to be able to do it.
Click to expand...

Um, thats Albert's comment not 4 posts above yours.

and Ridgeback actually read the documentation for his mac
ridgeback said:
Uhm...my Mac stuff says not to. CDR, HD, ProjectMix. I don't think it's a good idea at all.
Click to expand...

Swapping powered firewire devices without powering them down is asking for problems and just because you can sometimes is not true for everything and finding out the hard way that device X does not like it can get pricy. I have seen firewire ports go poof and destroy the device being connected to it on more than one service call.

A firewire port does not have a regulated power source like USB (fixed at 5V and current limited to 500 mA). It can supply up to 30V and is spec'd to 1.5 A max which is plenty to give you a big power spike
 
hmm maybe there's some sort of protection in mac os x against that, because in years of just unplugging and plugging my firewire device without bothering to power it down, never a single problem.
 
An Operating System can't do anything to protect against a hardware power short. Thats like saying Windows can protect a PC from a lightning strike. And yes, Ive seen plenty of Macs with blown Firewire ports from doing this, too.
 
Sweet crackers.

Okay.

Yes, you should always unmount devices on the Mac before disconnecting them, if they can be unmounted.

Firewire devices don't have a handy icon sittin on the desktop that can be dragged to the trash can (alternatively, you can click on any HD or other device on the desktop and hit Apple-E to eject it). You can corrupt data on external hard disks if you try to unplug without unmounting, regardless of OS. But firewire audio interfaces should be fine. I unplug mine directly from the laptop frequently.

As for what SonicAl said, I'm not sure if he meant that unplugging a firewire device can mess up the operation of other FW devices on the same bus... I don't see why that would happen (e.g. unplugging your FW audio interface causes data to become corrupt on a FW mounted HD). You should be fine.
 
I use only Macs, and I've had more than one hard drive corrupted by hot swapping firewire devices. My advice: don't do it.

If there is a desktop icon, throw it in the trash to unmount. Then, power down the device before physically disconnecting it. Hard drives have desktop icons, so this would apply to those.

If it's something like an audio interface that doesn't have a desktop icon, power it down before disconnecting it. If you have a hard drive chained to the firewire audio interface, unmount the drive first, power down the interface, and only then disconnect it.

I do believe that hot swapping can mess up other drives on the same buss, and in my experience, drives on a different firewire buss as well. I can't explain it technically and it's not *supposed* to happen, but it has.

I'm an experienced Mac user of going on twenty years, so I do know Macs pretty well. My advice once again: don't hot swap.
 
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