average admins

I recently purchased the M-Audio FireWire 410 and everywhere I read, i.e. during the installation, in the printed manual that came with the device, and on their web site, it says not to hotplug (to plug in or unplug while the machine is on) the device because it could render the device or the FireWire interface unusable. If you would like to read more on this from M-Audio, try the below article:

Caution: Do Not Hot-Plug FireWire Devices

I have never heard this about FireWire devices. I figured FireWire was like USB in that you can plug a device in and unplug the device while the machine us up and running. I know that you should “Safely Remove Devices” by stopping the USB service or whatever for the device before unplugging it (although I have never personally had any data lost by not doing this with storage devices… knock on wood) but still, USB is hotpluggable.

Does anyone out there have any experience with FireWire devices and can you confirm that this will indeed cause harm to the device or to the FireWire port? Is this just specific to this device? This is my first FireWire device and I don’t want to take any chances with the FireWire 410 or my MacBook.

Jeff

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Ask An Admin, Audio, Hardware, Mac, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.