NewerTech Voyager Q Users

[Robert M]

Bob,

Thanks for the compliment! I'm glad that there are two "Robert M"s contributing either here and/or at MacinTouch! But, as you're a Robert M, too, consider making that three of us!

Robert

[laarree]

You know, there are two Larrys in this thread too, I'm just sayin'...

[prof]

Thanks to a deal offered to OWC email subscribers for $80, I took the plunge and ordered the quad interface model today. I'll report back when I get it and test it.

Thanks for all the posts!

[joeheathen]

I've had one of these units for a few weeks now, and have experienced issues with maintaining a firewire 400 connection (no 800 ports on my late 2006 20" intel imac). It also interferes with other firewire drives/devices maintaining their connection. OWC was very friendly and readily shipped me a replacement unit, though the replacement unit has had identical issues (and I think it may be a refurbished unit due to scratches on the case). I have ended up using the slower USB connection rather than deal with the hassle.

Basically, if this is the ONLY firewire drive attached to my iMAC, I don't have a problem. But if other firewire drives are connected, the voyager Q causes all the firewire connections to become flaky. I tried every possible combination of hooking the voyager to one firewire port and daisy chaining my two other firewire drives off the other port, to daisy chaining the voyager at the end of the run. No joy. I also tried plugging the unit directly into the wall instead of my power strip.

Here's the steps that introduce the problem. With my mac shutdown, I have the voyager and two other FW drives connected and powered up. All three have boot volumes (cloned with superduper). If I boot my Mac with the option key pressed, NONE of the alternate volumes appear, only my internal drive. Once booted none of the firewire drives show up on the desktop or disk utility. As soon as I hit the power button on the Q to shut it off, my other FW drives mount.

If I'm already booted with the other drives mounted and turn on the Q, the drive will mount, but it leads to finder hangs and crashes almost immediately. Again, if the Q is the ONLY FW device connected, there aren't any problems. I don't know if it's a FW port wattage issue or something with my iMac's system, but I've had up to 4 FW drives hooked up to my imac in the past and never experienced issues. I'm pretty disappointed because I specifically bought the voyager (and paid the premium) over the competitors specifically for the FW speed. I do AV work and had planned on being able to quickly swap out stock video hard drives or project hard drives. This isn't an option if I want to keep my Time Machine/Superduper drives mounted.

I had read that these units had an issue with the firewire chip ID# or something that made it impossible to mount two voyager Q's at the same time, and that a firmware update corrected the issue. It is my admittedly uneducated assumption that there are still issues with this that interfere with other FW enclosures.