Odds and Ends: Too many Icecube enclosures can cause problems

Too many Icecube enclosures can cause problems Taiwanese vendor MacPower has confirmed to readers that there is a problem when using four Icecube (external 3.5? ATA drive) FireWire enclosures. Three enclosures works well, but upon connection of the fourth unit, problems arise.

MacFixIt reader Perry Karipidis writes

"Whenever I have all four enclosures on at the same time, and I try to copy items from Disk 1 to either: one of the internal drives or another firewire drive, the finder hangs while copying. If I turn off the 4th enclosure, the Finder comes back to life.

"However, if I copy items from Disk 2 to the internal drives or the other firewire drives, everything works fine. [...] I connected the 4th enclosure to the front of the G5's firewire port. Now the configuration is one enclosure running off the front of the G5 and the other three running off the firewire 800 port on the back of the G5. Voila. The problem disappears."

Macpower responds:

"Thank you for your detailed description. We are aware of this problem and are working on it.

"The solution will most likely be a firmware upgrade but we will let you know as soon as we have more details. For the moment, please do not connect more then 3 devices in the daisy chain, thanks."

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