External USB/Firewire Drive Reliability Poll

Tamron SP AF 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di for Canon

03/11/2005 03:58:45 PM · #26

Well I decided to buy the Maxtor One Touch II 300GB Firewire/USB drive yesterday. Here is my nightmare with this so far.

Hooked up drive, nice box, comes with firewire cable. Windows XP/SP2 does not recognize the drive without loading the drivers. Ok, I'll load the drivers, but I thought that it should just work with the vanilla drivers.

Installed Maxtors drivers and the retrospect software (probably won't use). Turned on, and drive was recognized. Maxtors driver tells me it's a FAT32 drive, and I probably should convert it to NTFS. I agree, so I let it do the conversion. It's very fast to do this, but unfortunately, after you do, the drive is inaccessible and disappears from "My Computer".

So I go to Windows System Manager, Drive Management, where I see the drive, and it tells me it's healty, but grayed out (My computer reports the drive as locked, but unlocking it by right click doesn't work.) So I go ahead and do what comes natural--do it myself.

I use the Disk Manager to reformat the drive to NTFS. After a very long time, about 30-45 minutes, it's done, and I am ready to rock and roll. I do note that the drive, laying horizontally on my desk, would make a nice cup warmer as it's pretty warm (but that could be good, as I assume the metal case is designed as a heat sink).

I start by copying over a bunch of video capture files that were cluttering up my hard drive. About 30 GB worth. During the copy, which seems moderately fast (definitely faster than my network), I get a "Delayed Write Error" and the drive disappears.

Ok, I restart the drive, it's recognized. No I try caputuring some video to the drive. 90 minutes captured to MPEG. It works flawlessly.

Start to capture another video. Delayed Write Error. Drive needs to be rebooted.

Start searching the web for a cure. I find a few things, but what the heck, I'll see if Maxtor lists this problem. They do.

Basically, it's a rehash of an article in Microsofts knowledgebase:

//support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;885464

Oddly enough, the fix for this isn't readily available. You have to request it from Microsoft. Maybe it truly only affects a small number of machines, but I have some nice hardware. A Dell Precision Workstation 650, dual processor, should be "business class" and not have avante garde problems.

I also found an article advising me to turn LargeSystemCache to 0 in the following key, but it was related to another similar Delayed Write problem. I've done it, but I'm not sure it's the right thing to do.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000000

So, that's my minireview so far. Getting another IDE drive (I already have two and 320GB, and was saving my last IDE channel for a second DVD burner. But it might be worth it, or even adding another IDE interface card to go internal.

Anyone else experiencing similar problems with their firewire drive?

Dyslexic

Canon EOS-40D

03/11/2005 04:37:35 PM · #27

Since you're talking about terabytes of storage,the cheapest and most reliable solution is to have a dedicated file server with partitions optimized for specific tasks. People tend to focus on hardware for reliability, and ignore the impact of software. I use XFS for large file performance and ReiserFS for small file performance. ReiserFS is quite stable these days. FFS is stable, but doesn't seem to do as well in either file size extreme. NTFS isn't a speed demon, but it's not as bad as it seems. People think NTFS is a drive killer, but it's really the way Windows uses NTFS that causes excessive wear on drives.

Portability is nice, but not when reliability is an issue. The new USB/FW drives are as reliable as laptop drives, but won't stand up to heavy use.

ScottK

Canon EOS-350D Rebel XT

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

03/14/2005 05:47:23 PM · #28

Neil: Why not use it as a USB2.0 device instead of firewire? My understanding (which could be wrong) is that USB 2 is faster than firewire anyway - something like 480Mb/s vs. 400Mb/s.

DanSig

03/14/2005 06:05:54 PM · #29

Originally posted by ScottK:

Neil: Why not use it as a USB2.0 device instead of firewire? My understanding (which could be wrong) is that USB 2 is faster than firewire anyway - something like 480Mb/s vs. 400Mb/s.

to use a USB drive just kills the processor, USB is processor reliant while Firewire is not, and then there is firewire800 wich is 800mbit/s :)

if youÂ´re going to work on your computer you dont want anything connected to the USB that can be connected to some other type of port like firewire or PCI.

the only thing USB is designed for is keybourd/mouse, printers/scanners and other low speed external gadgets, not highspeed devices like external harddrives, even though you can get USB boxes for harddrives it is not recomended for any use other than backup where you connect the drive for a short time to take your backup and then you unplug it.

try working in photoshop with a USB drive attached. slows the computer down about 50-70% if you are using the USB drive.

ScottK

Canon EOS-350D Rebel XT

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

03/15/2005 12:45:48 AM · #30

Interesting. Just to test this, I stuck a full 256MB card in my USB 2.0 card reader, started downloading files, then loaded an image into photoshop and ran a fairly intensive sharpening action on it. Before I loaded PS, with files downloading, the CPU was running under 5%, with occasional spikes to about 8%. While running the action, of course, CPU usage jumped to 100%, but then it did the same when running the action without the card downloading. And the action didn't seem to run noticably slower. This hardly proves anything, but its... interesting. :)

And, how often do you really access an external hard drive? Unless you're streaming the output from video production to it or something like that, loading and saving, say, image files is a pretty transient, and fairly infrequent, operation.

And, given the following options:

a) use USB and face a possible, occasional heavy load on the CPU, or
b) use firewire and face known issues of the hard drive locking up

I think I would pick a.

Of course, if the device is firewire800 that might change the equation somewhat. I was assuming it isn't, but I could be wrong. (Though, from what I was reading, MS sort of hobbled fw800 support in XP SP2 because of backward compatibility issues - apparently any fw800 device is stepped down to 100Mb/s. But that info was a little old, so maybe the issue's been fixed.)

Sony 24-70mm F4 Vario-Tessar T* FE OSS

03/17/2005 01:02:52 AM · #31

Update: I applied the few hacks from the internet, and the drive seemed to be working well. Until tonight--I received several delayed write errors.

Meanwhile, Microsoft sent me a hotfix, but I didn't download it until tonight--three days after they sent it. Since the hacks seemed to be working, I figured I'd go with that rather than a hotfix that's not fully tested yet. And the password they sent is already expired. So I had to email back and ask for another. Argh.

Scott, the drive has both Firewire and USB connections, so I could test that. But as I understand the Windows bug, it would have the same problem whether I used Firewire or USB. It's an issue having to do with disk caching external drives.

As to what I'm using it for, right now, I am using it to capture video--I'm capturing all my miniDV tapes to Mpeg, and then I'll write them all to DVD. And other than the initial problems, and the problem tonight, it's been working well. Tonights problem scared me, because at this point, if the drive gets trashed, I'll lose all those video captures! About 25 tapes worth.

Bear_Music

Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra

03/17/2005 02:48:57 AM · #32

Coincidentally, the people I work with just got me a Maxtor 300Gb external drive, and i set it up the other day as a USB 2.0 drive. Works fine out of the box, no problems whatsoever. Just in the nick of time too; I was down to 1.1 Gb space on the internal, 60Gb HD. Now I have dropped off all my old files to the external drive and freed up 50Gb of HD space. Whee! My machine's zinging again...

Robt.

03/17/2005 09:41:00 AM · #33

Originally posted by bear_music:

Just make sure you have backups of everything on DVD or CD. I wouldn't trust an external drive for very long with only one copy.

Please post if you get any Delayed Write Errors with the drive.

Good luck. I have only 50 GB left on mine--video goes through a drive very quickly, even in MPG format (and forget about AVI, which I try not to use, since it needs about 1GB for 5 minutes). But that's only temp. I'll be burning all of that data to DVD, and then I need to decide how much I trust the drive for other uses.

Mattel Barbie Photo Designer Digital Camera

03/24/2005 12:48:47 AM · #34

Update: I had the Maxtor 300 drive working under firewire for the past week or so, and it's worked ok. I applied the Microsoft patch, and changed the settings as I described below. However, it's not clear it's the cause, but my PC has been a terror for the past week. While I haven't gotten delayed write error, I am reading/writing to the drive through an application, and the errors I was getting seemed to be prompted by copying groups of files to or from the drive.

My expensive, Dell Precision Workstation with a gig of memory and dual processors and XP professional has had the reliability of Windows 3.1 this week. Not good.

I suspect Windows XP isn't "good" for firewire mass storage. I've switched the drive over to USB and we'll see if my system runs better. Stay tuned.

nsbca7

03/24/2005 01:42:16 AM · #35

The external drive I have is the same as any internal ATA. I have the case (which I discarded) and the face which I can swap out and connect at different times to any number of ATA harddrives. I have a few WD 180s I use for backup and have never had a problem out of them. They are they exact same HDs I have installed internally in two of my PCs.