We just received the ADS duallies about 2 months ago. I've got 4 loaded up, and can't see any performance difference at all. Benefit of this box is, no wall wart, works USB2 or Firewire. It's just a controller, nothing more. The drive inside all of these is just an IDE drive with an Oxford controller card. Nothing more.
The new ADS box is a little bigger, but then again, no wall wart. And handles bigger than a 220 gig drive, were there such a beauty for a decent price.

My advise... think long and hard before buying any prebundled firewire drives where the case and dirve are sold as a package like the Maxtor line which is popular. At least avoid the cheaper firewire drives. I know SPOT doesn't agree with how I feel about firewire drives but I'm not alone in my opinion. What follows at the end are just three of thousands upon thousands of similar complaints you can easily find doing a web search for firewire drives + problems.

My point is is you HAVE TO use one, fine. Otherwise drives in removable drawer may be a better choice IF you're not needing them on the road or for casual laptop use. If you're not spending half your life living out of a suitcase and/or aren't using a laptop, and I'm not doing either anymore, I wouldn't touch any firewire drive with a ten foot pole no matter how good it is suppose to be.

Just a few typical complaints follow:

#1 I have a Master, Belkin PC Card 2-Port Firewire, Toshiba Portege with 1 Gig of RAM running WinXP SP 1 and with a 60 Gig internal HD with 30 Gig free space. I go through Windows Explorer and select 10 Gigs of Video files from my external. After the first couple files are copied, the drive gets to a point where the time keeps going up and up, the indicator light goes out or changes from green to red and then finally I get a message that Windows couldn't write to the drive, and it appears in Device Manager with a Yellow Caution sign. Policies for the volume are for quick removal though setting to performance has the same effect, and the Indexing service has been turned off.

#2 Unreliable and error-prone

I had hoped this drive would provide cheap backup for a variety of files without the time and annoyance of cutting CDs or using other removable media. It has instead proven to be unreliable and unstable. Ive lost data, had it freeze up my system, had it cause conflicts with other firewire devices, and had it corrupt files and/or misplace parts of the file structure. The drive has so many problems that I connect it only when absolutely necessary. The transfer speed is terrible, so much so that using a "find" utility to locate a file on the drive is unbearably long, always resulting in an error. It may seem like a lot of storage for little money, but what is the value if it consistently loses data and crashes your system?

#3 I recently purchased a 1394 hard drive enclosure to provide more space for my video editing. I also got a Maxtor 120GB drive to go with it. The enclosure is only firewire, uses a 6 pin to 6 pin cable and is
powered. The problem is that it won't recognize the Maxtor drive.
I have installed the Maxtor as the slave with my main drive and it
works fine, formatted in NTFS and an active partition.

I have also tried an extra 60GB Western Digital drive in the Firewire
enclosure and it also works great. So that leaves the problem with
the Maxtor drive, I have tried all possible combonations of jumpers
and settings, to no avail.

personally I use external firewire/USB2 enclosures WITH a removable drive bay installed. I was a little sceptical (read.. careful) when I first set this up... as I was a little concerned about adding in an additional layer of complexity (and possible failure) to an extrnal drive setup (effectively the internal IDE connector inside the enclosure now plugs into an additional intermediate interface before connecting with the actual IDE hard drive).

But I have been using this setup now in several drives for several months without any issues.

The drive speed is ever so very slightly reduced in comparison to a direct wired external firewire drive (running the EZDVTEST software shows it very marginally slower than a direct attached IDE drive in a firewire enclosure).

A removeable drive bay should make no difference to how a disk performs. The thing has NO electronics in it. All it is is a convenient way to physically mount the disk and make the connections to it.

Firewire is a totally different concept, here there is electronics involved and the issue of physicaly mounting the disk and keeping it cool and supplying it with power. To top it off youv'e also got the question of the firewire controller in the computer.

Jus tbecause of the complexity I'd go along with BB. Maybe they can be made to work 100%, heck if you'e got a Mac that's about the only choice you've got so the idea has to be viable. But if you don't need it I cannot see an up side. Remember you do need a 1394 connection to the camera / VCR and it's quite likely even if you've got multiple 1394 ports they hang off the one chip. That chip can endup handling data from the camera to the CPU and then from the CPU to the external drive. It seems to work, probably most people don't have a problem with it. But then again parachutes mostly work, I just don't see the point of using one before I know the plane is going to crash.

The other thing that freaks me out about those firewire enclosures is (and this comes from observing Macs) they end up scattered all around the place, things on to of them, cups of coffee, books etc. in short a disaster waiting to happen.

But I'll probably buy one myself, becuase it is the only way I can add more drive capacity to my laptop. For that they are ideal, simply because there is no other choice. My main machine though has the OS on a removeable drive and 4 drives screwed into the box with lots of fans. If I want to use that machine for something other than editing I just swap the drive with the OS and apps on it. Its cheap and hassle free.

What look very interesting are the SATA modules, some of them are hot swapable, hmmm..

Hi Lamont,

We've been using the Maxtor 120 and 200 gig USB2/Firewire one touch drives lately. They have given us absolutely no problems, even on long form captures and print to tape. We use the USB2 connection but have tried the firewire with no degraded performance.

Mike

Here in Perth WA, we're just about as isolated as you can get, so we have to accept what's available.
With this background, I have bought 6 external HDs over the last couple of years. Four different brands of enclosures, all firewire / USB2 and various makes of 7200 rpm EIDE drives inside - some I've bought as complete sets, sometimes I've bought empty cases and inserted drives I formerly had inside caddy drawers.
I've no idea whether they have Oxford chipsets - I read DSE's recommendations about Oxford before I bought the first one and asked, but neither the retailer nor the packaging knew whether the chips were Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard.

The point is that all six have performed extremely well, and I couldn't imagine life without them.

Just do it.

#3 I recently purchased a 1394 hard drive enclosure to provide more space for my video editing. I also got a Maxtor 120GB drive to go with it. The enclosure is only firewire, uses a 6 pin to 6 pin cable and is

Billy, this isn't what you said in the earlier thread, you said you'd purchased a drive kit when Firewire kits FIRST came out. That was 4 years ago. In this biz, that was dinasaur years ago. The OHCI spec was still not being adhered to, Oxford was not there yet, TI and NEC and VIA were still shooting ducks in the dark.
You also said you'd pulled the drive out of the enclosure and now use it as a standard IDE drive. I'm confused how you'd " I connect it only when absolutely necessary" if it's not inside the enclosure any longer.
Of course I disagree with you. As I'm sitting here in a hotel room halfway around the world, I have 3 drive kits stacked in front of me, all running wonderfully. One of them is 3 years old, ugly as hell, cracked blue plastic.
Firewire drives screw up because people dismount them improperly, buy crappy enclosures, or have systems loaded with problems, starting with patched 1394 connectors.
Bottom line for the video industry, if AVID supports firewire as a storage medium, you can bet your ass it's been through severe and strategic testing. Avid, for all their faults, has always been right on when it comes to specifying system resources and components. And they endorse many drive kits. Maxtor is not one of them.
BTW, on ANY Firewire drive kit, there is no "number of jumper settings." The drive is MASTER and nothing else. The Oxford requires it.

SPOT, you're misreading what I said. I've mentioned this topic many times going back a long ways. I think the first time I brought it up was before I used BillyBoy, and if I remember right was just posting under my initials.

I never said nore meant to infer I used a firewire case. What I did say over and over going back probably a couple years is I took the drive (A Maxtor) OUT of its case. That's a difference. Item #3 above in my post isn't my experience, rather one of three complaints from someone else, which I thought I made clear.

Just so you and nobody else is confused as to what I said, I'll repeat (from memory) what I said originally.

My first experience with a firewire drive was a Maxtor 80 GB. This originally was marketed as a "portable" drive, not an external as they market it now. It came in a stackable plastic case that didn't have very good venalation and no fan. You need an external power supply. They still sell them. I'm not going to repeat in detail that the orginal failed and so did two replecements. I've said that several times in other thread already.

I'll go into a little more specifics about what's inside the Maxtor case. A regular IDE drive that has a special little adaptor that connects to the regular drive pins and mates with a very cheesy and very tiny little plastic inteface card inside the encloser. Its only about two inches long, and little more than a inch wide. THAT is the problem. This little circuit board is what converts the drive from IDE to Firewire. It is what keeps failing. Likely because of how poorly it is made and also because of WHERE inside the case it is mounted. I concluded that when you constantly connect/ remove the firewire cable from thiis drive because of such poor quality this can and does either pull the connector partially off the drive pins inside at the drive end or at the interface card end or again because of how badly made it is it can cause a short between the bare pins.

Now so everyone is straight, I did the following. I took the last replacement drive Maxtor sent me. Was this the 2nd or was there a third replacement? Give me a break, I don't recall. In any case when I got the last replacement, I immediately took the drive out of the new case. Next I took my "bad" drive and replaced it in the new case that had a new cheesy interface card. Immediately the drive worked again.

Obviously I or anyone else would conclude all these issues you see reported actually isn't the drive going bad, rahter the cheesy interface card that keeps failings. That's what I've reported in this forum over and over again. Don't read more into then what I said. I'm negative on firewire drives in general BECAUSE of this experience. If the original fails and so too do the replacements, wouldn't you feel the same?

You SPOT have experinece with "drive kits".... I'm relating my experinece with drives sold as a unit as external/portable drives that come already assembled as a unit.

While they look alike and work the same. Obviously my failure rate and that of thousands of others that have bothered to report them in forums, newsgroups and on web pages have had difference experiences than you have, because we're really talking apples and oranges.

Before Firewire drives, I used removable drive bays, but changing one required shutting down the computer, making the swap and turning the computer back on.

The problem with USB2.0 is that USB requires more CPU horsepower during transfers, whereas Firewire has dedicated hardware processing on-board to manage the data transfer.

I now use Firewire enclosures exclusively (a few with removable drive bays installed.) I use SIIG Firewire cards with the TI chipset and enclosures with the Oxford 911 (and now 912) chipsets and I never have a problem. I get all my enclosures from www.firewiredirect.com and I use only Western Digital "JB" series drives. (Maxtor drives are junk.) As was pointed out in another message, only buy enclosures that come with a fan. Heat will kill a drive pretty fast.

Firewire drives make managing my clients resources much easier than ever before. When a client comes in, I just plug in their drives and off I go.

James

I wouldn't go as far as saying Maxtor drives are "junk", in fact they're one of the major makers of drives. I've had a bunch of Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate and IBM drives, more or less, little difference.

What I'm saying is AVOID the package deals where drives are sold as a unit as either removable or "portable" drives. My experience which is all with Maxtor is in fact THIS combination is indeed junk. Not because the dirve itself is junk, it isn't, its just a plain Jane IDE drive, but the interface card inside the case for sure is junk or at least was when I was using it. ;-)

My experiences with firewire drives--not extensive experience I'll admit--did lead me to install two separate firewire PCI cards, one serving only as I/O to & from my external Cobra 120GB drive (with separate power supply and internal fan), and the other as I/O to videocameras and a Canopus converter. No hiccups yet.

While I am generally in agreement with Billyboy's posts, I have to disagree in this case. In your post, point #3 where the person complains about the drive not being recognized, this issue has been posted in this forum before, and is simply a case of the drive not being properly prepared. I've experienced the same problem with non-packaged firewire setups - Ads Pyro cases - and, I'm convinced it is a problem with WinXP (I run machines using Pro and Home). My solution was to pull the drive from the Pyro, and "install" it in an old 233 mhz machine (chose that machine because the main drive data cable can be accessed, pulled, and plugged into a non-permanently installed HD without actually dismantling everything and physically installing the unprepared drive). I let Maxtor's drive preparation software prepare (format) the drive, stuck it back in the Pyro, and, then, WinXP had no problems detecting it.

Mind you, this occurred with the Pyro kit (I own two of them), not with any of my Maxtor "packages" , all of which worked right out of the box.

I've also become quite good at opening the Maxtor cases, and can generally swap drives in those cases faster than I can the Pyros that require screw removal to open the case.

Bottom line in my experience is that all these firewire devices work good on my system. I've never lost data, and, so far, the non-cooled Maxtor enclosures have performed as flawlessly as the Ads Pyro setups (in fact, the reason I now own more than one Ads Pyro is because the first one I bought ceased to function - I sent it back, received a replacement, and, during the shipping time, I purchased a second enclosure.

Personally, I love all five of my external firewire drives, couldn't live without them.

The Maxtors have been "running hot" since day one, but are still functioning after two years of fairly intense use.

Just my experience,
Caruso

I think what it illustrates is the wide variance in far as it being dependable or not. This is just from memory, but if I recall right the Maxtor external at least the early versions had both a red and green indicator light. The early versions also had a power switch on the back of the case. The later models didn't.

One reason I posted the #3 comment was in closely paralleled my own experinece. I could have the drive on for hours, everything fine, Windows saw it, I could read from it, write to it then out of the blue Windows lost it. It would disappear from from the Windows Explorer listing of installed drives. Sometimes you could hear the drive spin down, the front panel light may flicker, other times it kept spinning, but you could no longer access the drive.

For all practical purposes the drive looked and acted dead. At that point any attempt to remount or unmount the drive were useless. It would even hang Windows if you tried to shut down normally.

I'd reboot. usually with no luck. I would wiggle the power connector where it fit into the case or the firewire cable sometimes if I wiggled it just right the drive would come back to life for a few minutes only to die again.

Like you say... my experience.

Peter,
you can always buy from AusPC Market, use them a bit and they get teh stuff here in 24 hours, WA might take them a bit longer and you'll get hit with freight but hey the stuffs not that heavy.

Yes, thanks Bob,

I would certainly look into this if I'd had problems, but fortunately all's been well so far. My enclosures bear such names as Flex, Momobay, and New Motion, and as I said I haven't been able to find out whether they have Oxford chipsets, but they all have fans, all have dual F/W - USB2 ports and all work fine.

We have been using the Maxtor 5000 250GB now for some time now - it goes from home to the office and everywhere in between.
Never had a problem - and couldn't now live or operate without it or something similar.

Mark
Brisbane OZ

The oxford 911 can control 2 drives as master and slave. I do this in a 2 drive case with a Granite digital bridge card.

Unfortunately, this particular bridge stalls (equally) with either one or two drives on any of three different systems, each with different controller cards.

The only case I've gotten to work reliably was the ADS enclosure. I have a dual link but would buy an other ADS case. I have to say I hate, hate, hate the black and silver ADS cases even though they work without fault. What I hate is the wall wart (what if I lose it or forget to pack it? I can't get a spare anywhere) and the low clearance under the drive (not enough airflow. One drive wouldn't work until I boosted it up onto drive rails. The pcb on the underside got too hot)

On the removable question, it's worth considering building a 1394 enclosure with a removable bay that matches the bays in one's edit station. That way you can slot the drives into the system or take them on the road as 1394 drives. (Not that I've done this. I haven't. Just considered it.) The problem is that most enclosures aren't deep enough for a removable bay and I wouldn't want to fool around with a lot of enclosures trying to find a big enough one that doesn't have playback stalls.

Rob Mack

Hey Spot,

You know, I've never found any ADS product you've ever mentioned on their site. Are you the only guy who ever sees these things or is there another link or is ADS just lax about maintaining their web page?

Rob Mack

SATA. Yes.

I'd expect to see 1394=>sata bridge cards before too long. One of the supposed features of SATA is hot swapability. Should mean that you could have a SATA drive in a removable bay that can be removed with the system running. You'd still have to unmount the drive, of course.

Rob Mack

Liam,

Which case and removable cartridges are you using?

Rob Mack

If it gives you the slightest trouble, even one playback hiccup, return it immediately.

Rob Mack