Comments

DJPadre wrote on 10/25/2006, 5:29 AM
never touched a maxtor in my life and of the units which ive repaired.. guess which drives required replacing..

On this main system, i have 7 drives... fed through a 2 port IDE PCI card (4 drives) and the other 2 ports allocated a further 3 drives, plus 1 for the master buring drive

with regard to externals, it seems to be Nero, Vegas and Windows explorer which is the culprit for nuking MBR's

Running USB2 however, i do not have this probem whatsoever, and despite my pedantic nature in maintaning and having "procedures" in how each drive is connected, its NOT user error... as theyre all treated teh same way, the only difference being thei interface tot the PC.

Today, it was the laptop which nuked the 200gb capture unit
In the past, it was the desktops doing this, but now i know its nto those.
The desktops are runnign SP1 with all the updates, the laptop SP2 and it does the EXACT same thing EVERY TIME...

not happy with firewire 1 bit...
JJKizak wrote on 10/25/2006, 5:38 AM
Geez, I have been using 6 Maxtor SATA 250 gig internal drives now for over a year. Also 2 300 Maxtor USB extrernal drives. I guess I should throw them all away and buy Seagate which bought Maxtor. Maybe Seagate knows something that I don't about Maxtor to spend millions purchasing same.

JJK
farss wrote on 10/25/2006, 5:45 AM
I've never bought a brand name external drive, always roll my own and only use things with lots of fans. I know someone who's had several LaCie's go south, those 1TB monsters hold a lot of data to loose in one hit!

Seems to me those Maxtors are not designed for high utilisation or they overheat.
DJPadre wrote on 10/25/2006, 5:51 AM
LaCie used to use WD and Seagates for their 1TB box's and i cannot count how many of these were sold for over a grand, and within weeks, they were returned as the bridge would overheat and fry itself..

I dont know what LaCie use now, but back then, the focus was more on keeping the drives cool, not the interfaces..

As for me, i found some nice cheap USB2/1394 external shells and havent had a problem with them, (I bought 6 blue eye, and 6 skymater units. all work a treat knock on wood..
BUT of these, when using USB2, no problem, but with firewire, i have problems with MBR's...
kkolbo wrote on 10/25/2006, 8:47 AM
Those of us who have been at this a while have cooked about every drive manufacturer's product. Using consumer drives with the high sustained use for video makes sure that they will cook. The only real solution is either industrial strength RAID units or BACK UP, BACK Up BACK UP. Of course during an important project last Spring I fail to do either and I went through a cycle of cooking one drive after another.

I have to have external drives in use because I am mobile from machine to machine on a regular basis. Firewire has given me better sustained feeds when I have multiple streams coming from the drive. USB 2 has been fine as long as the project file wasn't exteremely complex.

The key with externals is the cooling. For me, externals without fans have been a problem. They cook drives just from the heat. That inlcudes LeCies, WD and other top names. I have since been buying a dirt cheap, no name enclosure that is oversized, easy to open and has a fan. None of them has cooked a drive. hmm. The cooling has been the answer for me.
Laurence wrote on 10/25/2006, 9:18 AM
Let me agree with the cooling thing. It is really the biggest single thing as far as external drives go. IMHO it is more important than the drive brand. I blew a couple of drives from different manufacturers before I realized this.

One thing I've been doing lately is to use a bunch of drive enclosures with no fans and blow air on them from an external fan. I did this after buying some passive cooling enclosures without realizing how important the fan was. Anyway, it doesn't matter how you cool the drives, just so long as you're cooling them.