I too have been having drive wake-up problem for about year, though not the beeping issue. It started when I added a slave Maxtor drive to my digital audio Mac with a built-in Maxtor drive. As far as I could tell, the slave drive was often refusing to wake up, occasionally causing corruption problems. Not putting drive to sleep resolved the problem. After screwing around for months, I did replace one of the drives with another Maxtor, and placed the “problem” Maxtor into a Echostar Dishplayer, a hard disk based video recorder like TiVo devices. The drive has been in this device for several months now, running 24/7, without a single crash (always on and no sleep). Whereas the Mac continues to have same problems waking the new 80G Maxtor drive up from sleep. In one case, when the drive could not wake up, I did the absolute no-no thing to do out of frustration, and opened the case, and unplugged the IDE ribbon while the machine was still up. Plugged it right back in (do NOT do this at home, not a good idea at all), and to my surprise, the drive spun right back up, and everything was fine. My preliminary conclusions are as follows:
- Maxtor drives are fine by themselves, it is not a “manufacturing defect,” even though there may be a firmware issue
- Macs are fine with single Maxtor drives
- Macs (digital audio and the latest G4s) with maxtor master-slave drives have an interaction problem
- Not putting the drives to sleep resolves the issue, at least in my case
My machine is running OS X, and did this through all revisions. Have not tried this with OS 9. I wonder if anyone has tried using the other IDE connector going to the front of the machine (CDROM/DVD side), and use the second drive as master on that bus. If both drives are masters on two independents busses, it may resolve this issue altogether.
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