Deep sleep and FireWire 800 cards: Update from FireWire Depot

We previously reported that FireWire 800 expansion cards from some manufacturers can prevent deep sleep on certain Macintosh models. Now FireWire Depot has provided us with an update on their current testing results and work with FireWire 800 firmware:

"We have determined after doing some testing that the following FireWire Depot PCI host adapters can go into deep sleep:

• IOI-4601 dual channel PCI
• IOI-4602 dual channel PCI
• U2FW-PCI01 FireWire/USB2 combo PCI

"The conclusion we have discovered is that only PCI Host Adapters with a PCI -to- PCI bridge can go into deep sleep.

"We are continuing our tests and investigation.

"FireWire Depot is also close to releasing a firmware update for the 1394b PCI-800 host adapter cards. We have added sleep/spindown support in firmware v2.15, which we have just finishing verification on. We feel very confident about it as it has passed all our tests so far (except one case noted below).

"v2.15 also fixes a issue in Mac OS 10.2.x when you connect thru a 1394b hub/repeater to a 1394b host and you power on the bridge and drive after all the cables are hooked up which causes the drive to not show up. We found that just hooking the cable to the hub with the drive powered on worked fine, but power on after is an issue. Now both power on after and cable connect while powered on work fine in v2.15. The exception case that we just discovered today with v2.15 is if you are using specific 1394b cables from one vendor and connect thru a hub/repeater and the cable from the host to the hub is a certain length and the one from the hub to the drive is a certain length, then under Mac OS 10.2.x only on some specific G4 and G5 setups do you get a error in copying files. The same cable lengths from other vendors work fine. We have a v2.16 version we are testing now that fixed it on our G5 system, but we need to verify it and that will take a 1-2 weeks for complete testing so stay tuned.

"We will be releasing the v2.15 sometime next week and making it available thru our website http://www.fwdepot.com.

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