<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : Quite a few people on forums like these report blowing out firewire drives (they are connected via 6pin-6pin FW cable). The solutions seem to be:
1- power everything down while switching devices
2- Use quality firewire cable.

I don't know what's wrong in Paul's case, but I would suspect that the 6pin-4pin firewire cable is feeding power on some of the pins. It definitely isn't supposed to do this. The 4-pin connector should not be carrying any power at all. There are various ways to test this out. This includes trying a new firewire card ($25ish off newegg.com), getting a voltmeter and measuring all the pins (the 6-pin end plugged into the computer, turned on), or using a friend's computer. -->>>

What is sad is that the implementations of firewire that can be blown by a voltage generated in the computer. The technology exists to protect input circuits from 12 VDC.

So you’re saying that Sony is more of a standard than Apple?

WOW I would have bet the money on Apple, as it is I use more Apple than Sony so I cannot reasonably say that Sony better only knows the one side.

I think it comes down to who ships more connections and who is held to be the 'gold' standard. I'd bet on Sony I think.

Whether Apple or Sony knows firewire better isn't the point. It is the impementation. My experience with the Apple implementation has decidedly been worse than with the Sony versions.

Before you start thinking that I believe Apple's version to be bad, I don't know that to be true or false. But their package in its entirety, hardware and software isn't as friendly. And it may only be the software, not the hardware that causes the differences.

I believe that most of the problems that Apple has comes from the software side and they way they think that WE should know what's going on whenever they put out an update.

Older Macs don't have this protection, but newer Macs do if I remember correctly. On newer Macs you need to press a button in case you "blow out" your FW port. I don't know what happens on the firewire drive side.

Hi guys

We "may" have found the problem with all my blown firewire ports. Here in South Africa we use 220volts a/c power. Upon inspection we today found that the "live" and "neutral" of the 3 pin power plug had been swapped around on the extension cable we were using to power the PC. This resulted in a huge potential difference across the points when it should have had none. Although the power was fine to actually power the PC and peripherals, it "may" we think be our problem. Will keep you all posted and thanks for those who offered their 2c worth ..... esp. Debu who originally stated "check your power supply" .... thanks.

Except for Canon XL1's (not XL1s) our Mac lab at school handles all cameras and peripherals without a problem. No communication errors and no blown FireWire ports. The XL1 issue was caused by Canon not fully implementing the FireWire standard in the camera's firmware.

On the other hand it seems that early Sony Viao laptops would only communicate via iLink with Sony cameras. I'm told that this was some kind of software limitation that the early Sony's had. I don't know the exact cause but I have seen more than several students with this problem. The laptop doesn't recognize any camera except a Sony.