CVS external firewire drive?

[Jeff_Long]

Does anyone know if it's possible to connect an external firewire hard drive to a CVS? If yes, then which one and how do you do it?

[Scott_R]

Jeff,

Yes, it is possible to connect an external 1394 drive to the CVS. Here is a webpage from the NI Developer Zone that details what steps need to be taken to connect the drive to the CVS.

NI-1394 External Drive Support
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/FF8AD4405E67BB1C86256F080064F9D3

Take a look at that page and follow the directions listed therein. Let me know if you have any additional questions on this issue.

Regards,
Scott R.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[Jeff_Long]

Hi Scott,

I read the application note, which was good, but I'm still having trouble.

I connected the firewire drive to the IEEE 1394 "B" port. I have a camera connected to the "A" port and nothing on the "C" port.

The CVS does not recognize the drive. I've followed the troubleshooting tips, namely:
1.) The firewire drive is connected.
2.) It is powered on.
3.) LVRT7.1 in installed and NI-1394 External Drive Support 1.2.1 is loaded on the CVS. The configuration file "c:\ni-rt\system\partitions.ini" is present but completely empty.
4.) Power-cycling the external drive has no effect. Nor does rebooting the CVS.
5.) The firewire drive works properly when connected to a PC.

Please let me know what else to check or try.

[Steffen Hoog]

Jeff,
I do not know what is wrong at your system. May be it depends on the harddrive. I just want to let you know what kind of drive we are using. We bought a "Maxtor One Touch 160 GB". CVS and PC direcly identified the new hardware in our case.

[Steve Penney]

Hi Guys,

I've recently bought a CVS1456 and have successfully connected a 300Gb Maxtor OneTouch drive to the CVS. The drive is formatted with two FAT32 partitions of 150Gb each and the CVS picks these two partitions up as two drive letters g:\ and h:\ (Because Windows XP will only allow FAT32 partitions up to 2Gb, the larger partitions were created using Norton Partition Magic which only allows FAT32 partitions up to 200Gb, although if you take the drive out of the firewire enclosure and install it as an IDE drive it may allow larger partitions; apparently FAT32 supports partitions up to 2Tb, but this may need to be done in DOS and I haven't tried that yet).

That's the good news! The bad news is that the CVS does not detect the drive in these cases:

1) If the drive is plugged into the CVS and already turned on, and then the CVS is powered up the drive is never detected

2) If the drive is plugged into the CVS and turned off, and then the CVS is powered up and the drive powered up later then the drive is never detected

3) If the drive is detected and working fine with the CVS and then the drive is turned off, the app running on the CVS freezes/locks up. Turning the drive back on makes no difference.

In cases 1 and 2 the CVS will detect the drive if you physically unplug the hard drive firewire cable and plug it back into the CVS with the drive powered up. In case 3 your only option is to physically reset the CVS by pressing the reset button on the front of the CVS (this also works for 1 and 2 as long as the drive is powered up before resetting the CVS).

For a permanent installation where either or both the CVS and drive could temporarily loose power, this is terrible. Besides using a UPS to minimise power interrupts, does anyone have any ideas how to get the CVS to detect an external drive from a fresh start up without having someone there to physically reset it or play with cables?

One thing to note is that the CVS has no problem detecting the firewire camera from a fresh boot, so I don't quite understand why it doesn't detect the drive. I'm using Labview 8 and realtime so there is no ini configuration file like there is for Labview 7. I'm using NI-1394 External Drive Support 1.3.3.3.0 and IMAQ 1394 2.0.2

Many thanks,

Steven

Message Edited by Steve Penney on 05-25-2006 06:33 AM

Message Edited by Steve Penney on 05-25-2006 06:35 AM

[allen_h]

Hello Steven,

I believe using something external (i.e. UPS) to prevent and minimize power interrupts would be the best solution.  I suspect that the CVS does not have this same problem of detection with firewire cameras because their power is also being supplied by the CVS.  Perhaps you could set it up, so that you can power the CVS and external 1394 hard drive on and off remotely.

Allen H.

[kolachalama]

Hello,

I'm having trouble with the CVS not recognizing the exteranl firewire drive?

The firewire drive works properly when connected to a PC

I don't understand why it doesn't detect the drive when connected to the CVS, I checked whether the IEEE ports failed or not working by connecting the camera to different ports they are working fine.

Does any body know how to trouble shoot this problem.

Thanks and Regards,

Anna

[Jeff_Long]

Hi Anna,

In my experience, getting an external Firewire hard disk drive to work with a CVS boils down to two basic factors:

1.) The drive's Firewire interface must be OHCI compliant.  This is very difficult to discern from the drive packaging and/or datasheets of the online retailers.  I was forced to put a lot of time in to determine which worked well.  To my recollection a Seagate drive works alright as does one from a company called ADS Tech (discontinued as far as I can tell).

2.) The drive must be formatted with the FAT32 file format.  An NTFS drive will not be detected by the CVS.

I hope this helps.  I did not have any problems with power cycling or seqeunced power-up that some of the other posts indicated.  Make sure all of your CVS software is up-to-date.

[kolachalama]

Hello Jeff,

yes we did formatted the drive with the FAT32 file format. About the drive's Firewire interface must be OHCI compliant, i am confused with the idea

we have the firewire drive with one of the chipset that was compatible with the CVS device as mentioned in the link below but that doesn't give any info about the OHCI compliance.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/513DA08F2D674C6B86256F9600566D80 

From the available external firewire hard drives i could find some which are OHCI compliant, but noting mentioned about the chipset used.

how we would make sure that the OHCI compliant, firewire hard drives have the one of the successful chipset.

you have mentioned Seagate drive works aright, we might as well try that out.

Thank you very much

Anna

[Steve Penney]

Hi Anna,

The OHCI compliance refers to the firewire card that you have installed in your PC. I'm using an NI PXI chassis with the NI firewire card so I didn't have to worry about that part. If you are using a PCI firewire card in a PC then I'd suggest using a reputable firewire card manufacturer like Belkin which will include a statement on OHCI complience in the specs (see http://www.cwol.com/firewire/belkin-firewire-pci-card.htm).

For the hard drive, it looks like NI have tested a handful of chipsets that are used for the firewire interface to the hard drive. Most of these are Oxford chips and it looks like all the Oxford chipa they tested worked with the CVS, so to be on the safe side I'd go for an external hard drive that used an Oxford chipset. I've used a Maxtor OneTouch external firewire hard drive successfully with the CVS as these are based on the Oxford chips (the Maxtor OneTouch II uses an Oxford 912 chip and the OneTouch II uses the 924 chipset ... see these links:

http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/onetouch_ii_fw800_datasheet.pdf

 http://www.maxtor.com/_files/maxtor/en_us/documentation/data_sheets/onetouch_iii_fw800_400-usb2.0_da...

I did have problems detecting the Maxtor drives in certain power-up conditions and these have still not been resolved (see previous post), but as long as you have the CVS powered up and the Maxtor hard drive is powered up and then then plug in the firewire cable for the Maxtor to the CVS, it should detect it (and as long as the drive is formatted to FAT32).

I hope this helps ...

Cheers,

Steven