FireWire Cables do wear out.
I plugged in my portable firewire drive yesterday and…
nothing happened. Light went on. No data.
Boo.
Tried it on a different machine. Same problem. Tried it with a different cable. Same problem.
Not totally surprising. The thing is 3 years old and has been living the hard life in my laptop bag.
I picked up a new portable firewire drive today. Pluggeg it in. Nothing. Crap.
Since the new drive has a USB port, I tried USB. Works fine.
So, I swapped firewire cables to the new one included with the drive. Drive works fine!
Bad cable? Been working for years!
Turns out that the little bits of metal inside the connectors have been worn down from use. As a result, the data pins — which are a different length than the power pins, btw — were worn down and had lost their springiness. To the point of not giving a solid connection at all.
Cable is now in multiple pieces in the trash — I always cut up cables that are bad as it keeps others from “recycling” them unknowingly — and I likely now have two portable drives (which is fine — I’ll back a bunch of important stuff up to one of ‘em and leave it in the safe deposit box).
October 5th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Me confused…
“Tried it on a different machine. Same problem. Tried it with a different cable. Same problem.”
So you had two bad firewire cables?
October 5th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
One bad cable and one worn connector. With a very new cable, the worn connector still works.
Needless to say, said drive is not going to have critical data on it until I can replace the connectors.
October 7th, 2007 at 10:44 am
this proves u have been working too hard.
time to give “hard” drive a rest.
needless to say i will never have that problem.
October 10th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
said drive is not going to have critical data on it until I can replace the connectors
Will you do the replacing yourself or take it somewhere? I ask because I think I have a similar problem on at least one drive and possibly the FireWire port on an old iLamp, and I don’t have the hardware-fixing chops to replace connectors myself. I’m wondering if it’s a simple routine replacement I can have done for a reasonable price.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:34 am
I’ll hack it myself. Frankly, though, the cost of the replacement firewire ports will likely be more than just buying a new 2.5″ case. Maybe.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
I see. Thanks.