Hard Drive switch out
 

Hey guys any thoughts about this? According to some web sites Firewire 800 is usually
faster than USB2 so while the computer was out I
thought I'd switch the 500 external drive I'm not
using much to the USB and the 2TB drive to the freed
up firewire port but the computer isn't recognizing
the drives. Is there some rule for "once USB always
USB" and the same for firewire?" I wasn't adding any more hard drives just having the 500 external and the 2TB external change places.

L,

Bets

PS it's running Final Cut Studio Pro on a two year old g5 (which feels positively ancient)

Yes, I'm getting up to 60MB/sec via firewire800, but only about 18MB/sec via usb2 (that's on dual 2.3Ghz G5).


Hmm, I'd very much like to see that 2TB drive.... I don't think I've seen single drives with a capacity of 2TB.
There's definitely no such rule as "once USB always USB" and the same for firewire".
I swap drives from one enclosure to another all the time and it always works.

What enclosures exactly are you using? Any special bridge board in the 2TB enclosure? (I'd bet!)

Dino

Hey Dino, the 2TB I just picked up at Fry's or Best Buy--can't remember which--hell, maybe it was Good Guys, they're all the same to me. It's a Western Digital--2 1TB drives Raid O'd into one container. So right now I'm trying to edit an HDV several hour long project which a huge footage to finished product ratio--so in addition to my primary 500 gb hd (which I don't use to store footage) I've got a secondary internal 500, an external 500 attached by firewire, an external 1.5TB attached to the front USB and an external 2 TB attached via the lone remaining back USB port, all attached at the same time since almost every sequence needs access to footage from all the shooting days. And I'm still afraid of running out of room!

Ah, the life of a perfectionist artiste!

PS But I still haven't figured out why when I switch the drives' ports the computer doesn't "see" one at all and declares the other unitialized or something. When I put them back in their original place everything's okay. Slow but okay:)

Well, if it's two 1GB drives that are setup as a raid, then it's not surprising that a single drive hooked up is not recognized. You'd have to initialize (format) that first in order to use (using disk utility in /Applications/Utilities).
The other problem is you usually cannot combine two different drives (a 500gb and 1tb) for a raid - at the very minimum you'd have to reformat then both too and setup a new raid; this depends on the driver/interface - if it accepts two differently sized drives.
Why on earth did you buy a 2tb raid with usb interface?? Should have been firewire800 in my opinion, you're killing the enormous potential throughput of those two drives with the slowest interface available.
If you have backups, formatting some of the drives will give you some options of swapping and shuffling the drives as you want.
Hope this helps
Dino

Dino, I think you misunderstood a lot, you might want to look at the previous posts and respond again:)

The drives come from a store are usually formatted for DOS/Windows. They will run slow on Macs. Did you reformat the drives for Mac?

No, they actually come pre-formatted for Macs--it's the newest drive I have, the first external drive I bought a year ago was the 500 GB so naturally I hooked that up via the firewire, then a couple of months ago I bought the 1.5TB and now a couple of weeks ago I got the 2TB, thinking that whenever I needed to do my primary editing with footage held on the 2TB I could switch cords (while the computer was off of course) and hook the 2TB up to firewire and switch the 500gb to the usb. Unfortunately when I try this the G5 doesn't seem to recognize its old friends.

OK, I thought you had taken the bare drives out of the respective enclosures. That wasn't really clear from your first post.
1. So, all you did was exchange cables??
2. What brands exactly are all the drives? Are all of them Western Digital?
3. If so, are you sure they are formatted as HFS+? The datasheets of the WD My Books says all their drives come preformatted with NTFS.
4. Did you install any software for any of the drives?
5. Do you have another computer available to test the harddrives? Maybe a firewire port is defective on one of the enclosures.