{"id":1000438,"date":"2007-03-08T09:53:44","date_gmt":"2007-03-08T14:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2007\/03\/08\/firewire-killed-the-mac\/"},"modified":"2007-03-12T18:05:06","modified_gmt":"2007-03-12T23:05:06","slug":"firewire-killed-the-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2007\/03\/08\/firewire-killed-the-mac\/","title":{"rendered":"FireWire Killed My Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m about 99% certain that the various <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/mac\/2007\/02\/28\/lost-morning\/\">problems<\/a> I&#8217;ve been having on my main desktop Mac lately can all be traced to a misbehaving LaCie d2 external hard drive. (I leave 1% open for the possibility it&#8217;s the FireWire cable or controller, but I really don&#8217;t think so.)<\/p>\n<p>Partially I blame LaCie for this, and perhaps EMC, but mostly I blame Apple. There is no excuse for allowing a misbehaving external hard drive, from which I have not booted, to affect the operation of the rest of the system.  Mac OS X should be robust against any signal, valid or otherwise, from external devices. It should be equally prepared to handle the case where a device does not respond within the expected time frame.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Instead it seems that Disk Utility, the Finder, TechTool, Retrospect, and various other utilities all assume that disks will behave and do not properly handle error conditions. When that assumption is violated, it causes a cascading flow of errors leading to an eventual forced reboot, and possible main disk corruption.  <\/p>\n<p>This is one thing I like about both Java and XML. Neither assumes anything about its external input. Everything is verified. Their behavior is well specified in the face of both correct and incorrect input. Nothing is undefined. Sadly this is a level of maturity Mac OS X has not yet achieved. :-(<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m about 99% certain that the various problems I&#8217;ve been having on my main desktop Mac lately can all be traced to a misbehaving LaCie d2 external hard drive. (I leave 1% open for the possibility it&#8217;s the FireWire cable or controller, but I really don&#8217;t think so.) Partially I blame LaCie for this, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mac","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}