Sounds painfully familiar. Now I'm back to my "overtaxed 1394 port" theory. I, too, can render to the ext HD no problem. I'll continue to use my workaround. Thanx.

I found that some Drives in certain firewire enclosures worked, while others did not. I use IBM drives with Gynesis? chips and am not getting those Delayed errors, still can not capture to a drive without dropouts, but thats a diffrent issue. I have also put caddies in my enclosures to save money.

You're stuck between a rock and a hard place. The typical dance of Windows suffering one of those overly scary and factually not accurate delayed write error is for Microsoft to blame the drive and the drive manufactuer to blame Windows. Likely its the interface card, but may/could also be the drive or even both.

I see it somtimes on one of the drives I switch between two PC's in a removable drawer. On my downstairs machine this one drive will throw constant delayed write errors making it near impossible to load a file I want. However the same drive in an almost identical PC upstairs NEVER has any delayed write errors on the same drive.

The difference? The downstairs PC has a SIIG ultra 133 interface card, the upstairs has the packaged ultra 133 interface card that came with the Matrox drive. The kicker is since I switch this drive and many others in and out only one drive acts up and then only on one interface card. So probably something a tad off specs with either the one drive or maybe the interface card. Don't really know.

You can disable the write catching on most drives. That should get rid of the problem, but the drive will run a lot slower. I just live with it as annoying as it is no matter how many times Windows bugs you with the message the message turns out to be bogus and no file damage or file system damage happends. Another thing to pester Billy G about, but that's a long list. ;-(.

Hey BillyBoy. Thanks. I always pay a lot of attention to your posts. DGrob

I've had the "freeze" problem as well using ADS Pyro sleeves. USB2 external drives seem to work fine, though.

When I first bought 1394 hardware it was for a laptop. The case, an Acomdata unit, had to be returned to have a new and different bridge card installed.

Once I had that working I went through (and returned) every pcmcia 1394 card available at Compusa. None of them worked well enough to use, including the Belkin. I eventually ended up calling manufacturers to ask if the products were using TI chips. Often, they only used the chip within a certain serial number range of the product.

I ended up buying a Ratoc card at fry's. I had the Ratoc suport guy on the phone as I read off the serial numbers on the box in the store. Since then I've had no trouble with this card.

Gotta love 1394!

Rob MAck

When I finally bought an ADS Dual Link case the first drive I installed was an IBM DTLA something. Lots of delayed write errors. I ended up buying 5.25-->3.5" rail adapters and mouning the drive on those in a way that increased the airflow underneath the drive. Viola! No more problem.

BTW, Delayed Write Errors aren't neccessarily related to playback stalls. Most people getting the playback stalls have not been getting these errors.

Also, Delayed Write Error is a symptom of disk caching. You can turn that off. Then you will get some other error.

Rob Mack

I have to agree. You've got a lot of components that could fail on their own or because they are combined with other components. And "Delayed Write Fail" is just a message. A number of things could trigger it. Sometimes messages aren't accurate.

I can definitely tell you that this error can be caused by heat. And also that Delayed Write Failure isn't always related to the plain old Vegas playback stall.

My first drive/case/bridge/controller combo would completely foul up a few frames at a very specific point. All you had to do was copy a large file to the disk. My guess is that the error happened when the disk's cache filled. Just a guess but it's suggestive.

Rob Mack