FireWire and USB woes
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshJuly 10th, 2003 • 9:26 pm
It’s a bit sad that, after all the excitement caused by the introduction of “plug-and-play” technologies such as USB and FireWire to REPLACE the aging and fussy ADB and SCSI ports on Mac computers, and after half a decade of Macs shipping with these new ports, we are still experiencing far too many fundamental problems with peripherals.
To wit, this recent reader report update at MacInTouch.com:
Whether Windows or Mac, USB is nothing but trouble. In fact many of the USB peripherals (MIDI, audio capture) I have state that they will NOT work when connected to a hub but must be connected directly to the computer.
Then there is the situation faced by a colleague of mine, who has a FireWire LaCie PocketDrive. It’s already died on her once, requiring her to return it to LaCie for repair. The other day, all of a sudden, it failed to mount on her iBook or older G4 at home. I suggested restarting the machines, to no avail. She brought the PocketDrive to work, connected it to her dual G4 MDD and… it worked.
I too regularly experience USB and FireWire issues, from sleep-related issues caused by USB devices to my first and only kernel panic in Jaguar.
Puzzling, and very frustrating. It’s not plug-and-play; it’s plug-and-hope-you-can-play. Granted, it’s not quite as bad as SCSI used to be, with required restarts and SCSI ID and termination fiddling. But still!