VIA VT6307 Firewire 400 Chipset suport in Leopard 10.5.6

[thorazine74]

I'm trying to find out if this chipset should work or not.

 

Its commonly used in cheap unbranded PCI USB/FW400 cards together with other VIA Chipset for USB functions.

I posted another thread for the USB part of this card so lets keep this only for the Firewire part.

 

The Firewire OHCI controller is detected fine with Leopard 10.5.6 (iPC OSX86 distro).

I only have 1 Firewire (a WD Combo external drive with both USB and Firewire ports) hard drive so my experience resumes to that kind of devices, if you have problems or success with other kinds please post which firewire device you are using.

This particular drive is being detected fine when booting and hotplugging seems to work too.

The drive works well at first, although not so fast as in Windows I would say (without measuring it).

The problem starts after some time having the drive mostly idling, when trying to access the mounted volume it results in big slowdowns and beachballs in Finder, for example opening a folder could take 30-40 seconds, this in the best conditions, other times it seems like the drive and volume are still there but its imposible to access it (trying to open a folder results in a empty window, like the folder is empty).

 

I have read some reports that downgrading firewire kexts might fix this but I'm not sure which versions, some persons report you need to downgrade firewire to Tiger kexts, that seems too radical to me, I havent tried that.

 

I havent tried any other solutions because I dont know of any.

So if you got a working firewire connected to this kind of controller please report how you got it to work.

 

My drive got the common WD independent power management feature that turns off the drive spindle after a certain time, independently of OS Power Management, I wonder if the problem could be related to that, OS X not being able to make the drive power up the the spindle engine when its accessed after some inactivity period? (This doesnt happen when the drive is connected though the USB port, the drive powers down and up on demand without troubles).