External hard drive and Audiophile firewire not liking each other

iwantmypie

iwantmypie

New member
Howdy. So I'll give you all the lowdown. I recently purchased a new external hard drive to put all of my audio tracks on an relieve some stress for my main hard drive. Now I have the hard drive daisy chained through my M-Audio Firewire Audiophile. Now I have the Audiophile hooked up to my laptop via a firewire card I installed in the PCMCIA Cardbus. Both the Cardbus and Firewire card have a TI chipset.

Now the problem is that I can not play any audio tracks off my the external hard drive without having them drop out almost immediately. As of now I'm not even worried about playing my projects on n-track, I worried that I can't even play songs in iTunes or Winamp without this happening. Here are the rest of my specs.

HP Pavilion ze4800
Windows XP Professional SP2
AMD Athlon mobile 2.12GHz
512MB RAM
External hard drive Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB Cache

Now I've tried every sort of combination as far as daisy chaining these two devices and none is better than the other. I was wondering if there would be some sort of problem caused by the Cardbus and not being able to handle all that information flowing through it and if there were any sort of tweaks that I could do. Now I've been all over the net and used many many tweaks to give DAW optimal performance and these did help when I still had all my audio on my main hard drive.

My second but not so important question is about IRQ's. I've read about switching to Standard PC and being able to manually assign hardware IRQ's but I was wondering how to do this since I cannot find anything related to that and PCI assigning in my BIOS. I'm guessing because I have a laptop. I really would like to be able to change my IRQ's because my Cardbus/Firewire card share an IRQ with my Ethernet card and this causes many pops. I could however disable the Ethernet card and then enable it and it reassigns it to a new IRQ and the clicks and pops will be gone. Only problem is that when I restart my computer it goes back to sharing with the firewire.

Man I'm a mess! Thanks for reading and any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks
 
Daisychaining firewire is bad, always.

Options,
use USB mode if that drive has it available.
Return and get USB drive
Return and get eSata drive if your machine supports it. This is the best option if available.
 
Hard2Hear said:
Daisychaining firewire is bad, always.

Options,
use USB mode if that drive has it available.
Return and get USB drive
Return and get eSata drive if your machine supports it. This is the best option if available.
Click to expand...

The drive does have USB on it but my computer only has USB 1.0. I suppose I could try it again but it was so bloody slow the last time I tried to put files on it that I almost killed myself. I am also not familiar with eSata, if you could elaborate a little that'd be booya.
 
eSATA is simply external sata. There are esata cards and enclosures available. They benchmark extermely well, on the right systems the same as internal sata.
 
Hard2Hear said:
Daisychaining firewire is bad, always.
Click to expand...

Daisy-chaining FireWire is just fine. Daisy-chaining M-Audio's FireWire gear, however, is very, very unreliable in my experience. I've never gotten any of their FireWire gear to play well with other devices on the bus, and I've talked to other folks I know with other M-Audio interfaces and they have experienced similar problems.

You have three choices:

1. Use a separate FireWire bus for the interface.
2. Kick the M-Audio gear to the curb.
3. Use a non-FireWire hard drive.
4. If you haven't already, try it with the M-Audio interface as the first device in the chain. Sometimes that will work when other configurations don't.
5. Find a FireWire card with more than one independent FireWire bus. I'm not sure which (if any) cards do this, though. Either that or use two cards. Or use a multifunction FireWire/USB 2.0 card and use the USB 2.0 side for the hard drive.

I wish I could give better advice, but M-Audio's FireWire implementation is just too broken to salvage in my experience. See my rant about how the FW1814's S/PDIF ports go mysteriously dead unless the FW1814 is the first device on the bus, and how it fails even if the device is hanging off a powered hub....

WARNING: if you do #4, do not EVER turn off the M-Audio interface. If the Audiophile FireWire is designed like the FW1814, turning off the interface's power switch will instantly disable the second FireWire port, and your external hard drive will suddenly disappear.

This is VERY BAD hardware design on their part, and I'm pretty sure it egregiously violates FireWire standards; the power to the PHY (*) for a bus-powered device is supposed to come directly from the FireWire bus if power is present on the bus, but M-Audio doesn't do that (as best I can tell without dismantling it and tracing out the circuit). Instead, they power the PHY directly from the switched device power, so when you power down the device, you also power down the PHY (which, among other things, is responsible for the data forwarding between the two FireWire ports).

The bottom line is that, IMHO, M-Audio gear is cheaper than most other brands for a reason. They appear to have cut a lot of corners in their design and testing. Sorry you had to find out the hard way. :o

*sigh*


(*) PHY is short for PHYsical. It refers the the chip (or cell within another chip) that is responsible for converting from a bus-neutral signaling format into a bus-specific signaling format. For example, in Ethernet, a transceiver (if you remember those things) is basically an external PHY. Most bus architectures (including USB, FireWire, SATA, and Ethernet) have a PHY that is typically separate and distinct from the controller chip to make it easier to design devices with multiple physical interfaces.

For example, the same controller chip could be attached to both a FW800 PHY and a FW400 PHY for a hard drive that has both a FW800 and a FW400 port. IIRC, some PHYs can even provide FW800 on one port and FW400 on a different port, but I could be remembering wrong. In any case, the PHY is the most critical bit, as it interacts with the bus itself. If a part is going to blow from a power surge, it's the PHY. If a part is going to do something while the device itself is off, it's the PHY. And so on.

In FireWire, a single PHY can support up to two ports at a time, providing data transport between the two ports while simultaneously providing data transport to the FireWire cell that provides access to the actual device (audio interface, hard drive, and so on).
 
Last edited:
You're always going to degrade performance daisychaining devices on Firewire. Thats why I never ever recommend it.

Just another thing. Combo cards (fw/usb, 400/800) are pretty unreliable for pro audio. We have tested many of them, but dont recommend any of them. Not that they dont look good on paper, but in actual production environments they dont do well enough for us to support them on our systems.
 
Thanks for the info dgatwood. I've been thinking that it might be time to upgrade my card. Hopefully some other audio interface would do the job.
 
Hard2Hear said:
You're always going to degrade performance daisychaining devices on Firewire. Thats why I never ever recommend it.
Click to expand...

Well, depends on what you mean by "degrade". If you mean the hard drive won't be able to stream as much data as quickly, then yes. If you mean stuttering audio, it shouldn't unless either A. the audio app is stupid and isn't preflighting read requests far enough ahead for a high latency hard drive configuration (more common than it should be, unfortunately), or B. the audio interface is broken and is trying to use bulk mode instead of isoch or something similarly wrong, or C. both. :D

The unfortunate thing, though, is that if the cause is A., then performance will be relatively poor with any external FireWire or USB drive regardless of whether you're sharing a bus. It will just be worse with bus sharing....


Hard2Hear said:
Just another thing. Combo cards (fw/usb, 400/800) are pretty unreliable for pro audio. We have tested many of them, but dont recommend any of them. Not that they dont look good on paper, but in actual production environments they dont do well enough for us to support them on our systems.
Click to expand...

That's a shame. Shouldn't be hard at all to build one that works... assuming you can get more than one interrupt on a CardBus slot... I'm not sure about that. If you can't, then it would be impossible to build one that didn't suck because the interrupt load from the USB bus would probably hose things pretty badly. :) *sigh*
 
I'm running a Motu828mkII daisy-chained to a Glyph GRT050 firewire drive on my Gateway XP laptop.

ZERO PROBLEMS.

Some manufacturers write their drives correctly, some don't....

Try a firewire hub or, if you have more than one firewire port or can add a PCMCIA firewire card, split up the devices.
 
TimOBrien said:
I'm running a Motu828mkII daisy-chained to a Glyph GRT050 firewire drive on my Gateway XP laptop.

ZERO PROBLEMS.

Some manufacturers write their drives correctly, some don't....

Try a firewire hub or, if you have more than one firewire port or can add a PCMCIA firewire card, split up the devices.
Click to expand...

In my experience, hubs and the M-Audio interface don't get along too well. Your mileage might vary, but....

I'm still not 100% convinced it's all M-Audio's drivers, either, though it could be. There's an easy way to find out for sure whether it's their hardware or their drivers, of course....

ISTR that the later revs of the FW1814 firmware speak standard FireWire AVC, and I'd imagine their other devices behave similarly. Thus, you might try making sure you're up to the latest version of the device firmware (install the latest drivers from the M-Audio website and it will upgrade the firmware if needed), then deleting M-Audio's drivers entirely and see if it works better. If so, it's their drivers, if not, it's the hardware. (Or, just for fun, it could be both.)
 
dgatwood said:
Thus, you might try making sure you're up to the latest version of the device firmware (install the latest drivers from the M-Audio website and it will upgrade the firmware if needed), then deleting M-Audio's drivers entirely and see if it works better. If so, it's their drivers, if not, it's the hardware. (Or, just for fun, it could be both.)
Click to expand...
I have tried using the hard drive without the Audiophile turned on and it works flawlessly. I've also upgraded the devices firmware to the latest release. I might just have to look into something else because I'm sick of dealing with M-Audio's support or should I say lack of support.

Anyone want to sell me a Firebox for cheap? :D
 
TimOBrien said:
Some manufacturers write their drives correctly, some don't....

Try a firewire hub or, if you have more than one firewire port or can add a PCMCIA firewire card, split up the devices.
Click to expand...

This is the crux of the matter, and bears repeating: "Some manufacturers write their drivers correctly and some don't".

I started off with a Behringer FCA202 firewire interface on my iBook, and it worked fine as long as there wasn't an external hard drive on *either* the firewire or USB ports. Connect an external hard drive to the laptop and the interface didn't work properly.

I bought a MOTU Traveler and it worked *flawlessly* the first time and ever since. Same iBook, same external hard drive, same setup i.e. the hard drive daisy chained to the interface.

My suggestion is to ditch the interface you are using now and try a different one.
 
well, in defense of these so-called "bad manufacturers who can't write", some people just think the term "daisy-chaining" sounds gay and does not make sense b/c daisy's do not have chains in the firstplace, therefore they don't support that term and what it represents within their products, so in conclusion, to each their own, if you like gay terms like "daisy-chaining" then go with a more fruity company.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top