External Firewire enclosure gets disconnected randomly

From what I recall,  the cases of this I have heard about so far point to one of two causes.  First,  a bad firewire cable.  Although price does not necessarily mean quality in a cable,  cable quality can make a big difference in performance.  Right now I have 2 4pin to 6pin cables which I paid $10 each,  and they work like a champ when I connect my external HD to my system.  I also have a Belkin 4pin to 4pin cable that also woeks flawlessly to connect my digital camcorder to my Dell notebook.  Of course,  I also paid $35 for that cable at Best Buy before I "knew better"...  I feel that I was lucky in getting my cheap cables because many folks here have had problems using such cables.

The second possible cause of your problem would be Windows XP (if that is the OS you are running).  I beleive that MS has documented and fixed 30+ firewire related bugs in XP.  My understanding is that the majority of them are addressed by XP SP1 (or SP1a) and then there are several more hot-fixes that need to be applied after that.  If you are running XP,  you might want to check into that.  IIRC,  the user "SpeedStep" on this forum has a pretty good list of MS issues with firewire,  and how to address those that have an answer.

Yeah that is a bit odd.  I also have a combo 2.5" carrier,  and mine has been working good so far.  I was little disappointed in the overall performance with it,  but I still can't complain too much.  When I connect it via firewire to use as the destination for a Ghost 2003 image,  I only get about 600 MB/Min throughput,  although I get about 850-900 MB/Min using the same drive in my media bay.  Both firewire and USB 2.0 perform about the same when copying a large amount of data to the drive using Windows Explorer,  but that is not a very good "scientific performance measure". 

I have not yet tried too hard to get the USB 2.0 PC-Card to work under DOS so I can try to get performance numbers that way,  but I suspect it will be a much more difficult task than it is worth (since the firewire connection works ).

I've already had the motherboard in my 8200 replaced once to correct the firewire port issues and am about to call Dell again to get them to replace it a second time.

Yeah i think the firewire port built in is a bit duff so i bought a Firewire PCMCIA card. This solved the random disconnect gubbins but unfortunately i still get the error where XP Bluescreens and complains about disk.sys.

Funnily enough linux worked great with the PCMCIA card althoug it did disconnected randomly when i used the DELL Port. Hmmm, it seems both DELL and Microsoft are at fault.

How did I convince them to replace the board.

Well, it took me twenty minutes of time on the phone for me to finally let *them* know that the problem was with the connector on the motherboard.  Sure enough, when the Dell tech came out with the part the following day, it fixed the problem.

It's still not perfect, however, but it actually works half the time now.  The dropouts are nasty, especially when burning to 4x DVD-R media (that stuff is costly when the firewire connection drops!).

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@JersWork wrote:

From what I recall, the cases of this I have heard about so far point to one of two causes. First, a bad firewire cable. Although price does not necessarily mean quality in a cable, cable quality can make a big difference in performance. Right now I have 2 4pin to 6pin cables which I paid $10 each, and they work like a champ when I connect my external HD to my system. I also have a Belkin 4pin to 4pin cable that also woeks flawlessly to connect my digital camcorder to my Dell notebook. Of course, I also paid $35 for that cable at Best Buy before I "knew better"... I feel that I was lucky in getting my cheap cables because many folks here have had problems using such cables.

The second possible cause of your problem would be Windows XP (if that is the OS you are running). I beleive that MS has documented and fixed 30+ firewire related bugs in XP. My understanding is that the majority of them are addressed by XP SP1 (or SP1a) and then there are several more hot-fixes that need to be applied after that. If you are running XP, you might want to check into that. IIRC, the user "SpeedStep" on this forum has a pretty good list of MS issues with firewire, and how to address those that have an answer.

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@starsheep wrote:
I don't wanna sound rude, but don't you think I would ask for help if I hadn't sorted out such problems like cable problems.
I already changed it and already have Sp1a and already tried the hotfixes.
The only thing I haven't tried is getting the mainboard replace as someone wrote that solved his problems.

Next thing I will do is return the case and see if the FW port is broken but that kind of is my last option

Greetings
StarSheep

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