Bad Firewire Ports on Decks

We just got a bad firewire port on a Sony HDV deck (HVR-M10U). It looks to me like a wear-and-tear issue--the deck gets moved around a lot with lots of folks pluging in cables and taking them out. I was talking to our repairperson from Advanced Systems Group, and he offered some advice on how to deal with firewire on decks.

Our repair guy, Al, says that he has seen a lot of firewire ports on decks go bad. I think he was describing a different kind of problem--our port looks rather mangled, which IMHO is the cause of the problem (a cable won't even fit into the port.) But he says that the firewire port on decks often die without any visible wear-and-tear (especially 4-pin ports, which is what Sony uses on its prosumer and consumer gear.) Here's a a workflow that Al recommended to help prevent dead firewire ports:

Connecting a deck with firewire to a computer
-Make sure nothing is plugged into the deck, especially a power cable
-First plug the firewire cable into the computer
-Then plug the firewire cable into the deck
-After that, plug in the other cables and power up the deck

Apparently, one possible cause of bad ports is trying to plug a firewire cable in backwards, which I think is easier to do on a computer with a 6-pin connector. If you plug a firewire cable in backwards either on the deck or on the computer (when the deck is plugged in on the other end) then this can kill the port on the deck. You may think this is hard to do, but I've heard first hand of an anonymous someone who did this on a hard drive (thus, killing the firewire port on the hard drive.) I have an old G4 that had lots of problems with firewire 400 ports going bad.

I've heard that firewire 800 is a lot more resilient to these types of problems. That's one reason why I always try to use firewire 800 interface--if a hard drive has both a firewire 400 and a firewire 800 port, I always cable with the firewire 800 port if possible. Despite what the terminology implies, only under ideal situations do I find that I really get a lot more performance out of firewire 800 than firewire 400 (see my post "The Trouble with G-RAID's"), but for me it's worth it to use firewire 800 for the added peace of mind.

If you want to get all nerdy on firewire problems, I'd recommend this article "FireWire Port Failures in Host Computers and Peripheral Devices" over at the Wiebetech site.