Monday, January 25, 2010

Firewire Card Readers under Snow Loepard

I just completed my migration to Snow Loepard and ran into a big problem; Snow Leopard doesn't always recognize firewire 400 card readers. In my case I'm using older microtech firewire 400 card readers but I have verified the same thing occurs with other firewire 400 card readers as well. You can find other occurrences of this at the Apple online forums here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2137004&start=0&tstart=0

The card reader shows up in the System Profiler but not in Disk Utility or Finder. It works sporadically which is the reason I went ahead and upgraded. Sometimes it works but most of the time it is a problem. The work around is to plug the card reader directly into the front or back of the MacPro with the card in (there are more problems when it is plugged into a firewire hub such as the monitor), put the computer to sleep and then wake it up.

I've been meaning to upgrade to firewire 800 card readers for a while and I haven't heard of any complaints with firewire 800 card readers or USB (except one person that claims to have problems plugging in the Canon 5D Mark I camera directly via USB but I did the same thing without any problems). So hopefully Apple or the card reader manufacturers will fix this soon.

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