Why do firewire drives on Mac OS cause processes to go into uninterruptible wait?

Posted by akraut on Super User See other posts from Super User or by akraut
Published on 2011-01-14T13:26:43Z Indexed on 2011/01/14 13:55 UTC
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mac

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external-harddrive

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firewire

I have a Western Digital My Passport Studio external hard drive. It works with either Firewire 800 or USB 2.0. I've noticed that when I have it connected to Firewire, after a few hours, processes on my Mac start to go into an uninterruptible wait state. Eventually the system becomes so hard locked that I can't even shut it down. I have Spotlight indexing of the drive disabled, and the mds process seems to be the one that triggers this eventual system collapse.

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