When you shut down your system, do you turn off your computer and than shut down your Maxtor? and when you start your computer, turn on your Maxtor before turning on your computer?... I was told By Maxtor that it did not make any difference...

MoBetta

I've had no problem with my maxtor 80 gig. But I would like to know about 'powering down'. I mean there is no on/off switch on the thing.. do you just un plug it ?

You need to take some precautions with any external firewire drive like the Maxtor. I have had one for some time. There is a right and wrong way to power down.

First to activate you need to power up the computer, then the removable hard drive with NO fireware cable connected to your computer. Once booted, THEN and only then plug in the firewire drive cable. Under XP you should hear an audio cue, and see a pop up that Windows sees the drive and it will also offer to open directory window along with several other options. If so, then you can use normally.

Unmounting this kind of drive can be problematical. On the task tray (extreme lower right hand portion of your desktop)there should be a funny looking icon with a little drive with a little green arrow above it. If you don't see it you may need to show hidden icons. IMPORTANT! Never shutdown prior to unmounting the drive from within Windows! There is only one right way. Locate the icon I mentioned, then click. Windows should say one of two things, either that it is safe to remove the Maxtor or that it can't be removed at this time. Only remove if you get the confirmaiton that you can.

If you get a message saying the drive can't be removed, then determine why not. The most likely reason is another device or some software is currently accessing the drive. Shutdown whatever it is. Even just having Windows Explorer active on any external drive can prevent you from getting the go ahead to safely remove the drive.

If you ignore the warning you can corrupt any or all the files on the removeable drive or damage the firewire interface card. Failure can be immediate and you won't know until the next time you try to mount the drive. While such devices are suppose to be "hot" plugable, meaning you can install or remove while your computer is running, you need to still follow proper procedure or risk damaging your data/drive.

One more caution about the Maxtor 80GB drives. They can (and have) failed with no warning. So far I'm on my second replacement. I use mine a lot and it gets its share of handling. That's the problem. The power cable must be removed only by pulling straight back and with great care. Never wiggle the power connector or let the power supply box hang under its weight which can cause stress. Also the interface card inside the drive case is prone to failure. Like I said, already two have failed on me, being unable to access the drive (no red access light when plugging in the fireware cable). Having had over 60GB data I was not about to kiss it good bye. The fix for me anyway was to open the case, (will void the warranty, but I got my replacement from Maxtox already) remove the drive (regular drive inside, connected to a little firewire interface card) then switch the replacement drive in order to get the data, then reinstall the new replacement drive back on the new interface card and finally putting the old drive back on the damaged interface card and closing up the case. A royal pain obvously. Surpise, the drive inside is a run of mill stanrdard Maxtor drive with special jumpering. You can, and I'm about to take out the drive, change the jumper to slave and then put the stupid thing in a removable caddy, then it will get its power off the system and still be portable. It will even run faster since a firewire drive is limited to 400 Mbps.

At home I've been using the same Maxtor drive you have for almost 2 months and no problems. BUT, at work it's a different story. We just switched from Western Digital (which worked great) to Maxtor last week and it's been a disaster. Not only does VV3 freeze up all the time but now the computer doesn't start up properly. It asks you to go into Safe Mode, run diagnostics, etc.

We're in the middle of fixing it and it's a real pain.

In the future I'm planning on going with Western Digital. From my experience it is more stable, reliable and looks more compact. The Maxtor seems big and clunky in comparison. I wonder what other people's experiences are with Western Digital vs. Maxtor.

I've used Maxtors in both ADS 1394 cases and Beyond Micro cases. The drives seem fine; the cases seem to fail way more often than they should.

Simple enough to see if it's your problem - simply unplug the thing.

I have had similar problems with my 80GB Maxtor. It worked great for the first few months of use, but recently it has been causing system errors and when I go to shut down, I occasionally get the blue screen of death (win 2000) and have to manually shut down the computer. When the drive is not connected, I have no problems. I took it to my fellow VV3 friend's house and he had problems with it on his computer too. I have the Western Digital 7200 120GB IDE drive that I have been using for all of my video editing and I have had no problems with it.

I spoke to Maxtor and they certainly did not mention to follow what you are suggesting, but if it is what's necessary to avoid dammage to the unit, I'll follow the procedure.

One question? Once you have clicked the icon and de-activated the drive, do you unplug immediately from the back of the computer and than shut down so you can repeat the same process when you turn it on the next time? and won't all that plug / unplug damage the firewire connection after repeating this procedure day after day?

I mentioned my little problem because I thought that, if it occurred to someone else, it might be confusing. I've only experienced the problem I describe when, for one reason or another (electrical storm, etc), I have, after shutting down my computer, also shut down one or more of my external drives, then, forgot to power them back up before attempting to boot my computer.

In general, unless I'm physically moving one of these drives to another system, I never have occasion to dismount them or power them down. Rarely do I power my system down at all, but, when I do, I turn off the computer and don't bother with the firewire drives.

If you do choose to dismount one (by clicking on the little icon mentioned in an earlier post), all you do is disable your system's recognition of that drive, nothing else. The provision is there to prevent you from disconnecting the drive during access by the system (which at best can interrupt a save causing you to lose both the new and old version of a file).

There is absolutely no danger in dismounting a drive and then choosing not to unplug it.

I cannot comment on the performance of the connectors for these drives, as I don't unplug/plug mine that often.

As for the drives, themeselves, mine get very heavy use daily, and I have them powered up 24/7. The youngest of these drives is 9 months old, and I've experienced no problems with any of them (KOW).

BTW, two of my drives have power switches, the newest one is "switched" on and off by pulling the power cord, go figure.

Interesting thread. Glad I stumbled across it.

Caruso

Its a catch 22. BTW the procedure was given to me by some tech at Maxtor when I first got my original drive about a year ago and Windows 98SE didn't see the drive at all until I downloaded a system upgrade. I don't know what others experienced, but using the Maxtor drive back and forth between 4 different systems Windows will not "see" the drive on any of them with the firewire cable plugged-in at boot.

Since the drive has a seperate power supply, plugging it into the drive plus plugging in the firewire cable and taking it out again does indeed cause the wear and tear no matter how careful you are.

Again, with a new replacement, the connection into the drive right now for the power cable is nice and tight. Over time it gets progressively easier to "plug in" which so far for me at least results in the internal interface card failing. I'm only my second replacement! What happens apparently since I've now looked inside the case is there are two jumpers cables, which perhaps from all the repeated vibration one or the others works itself off the connector, (what I saw) thus preventing the drive being accessed. Not a very good design in my opinion.

For what its worth Maxtor replaced the drive the first time... no questions. This time they didn't want to right away and accuded me of handling it roughly. I protested that it is suspose to be a "portable" drive and take such use, they said no, not really. It is an "external" drive, not a portable meaning no, you're not suspose to move it around that much. Live and learn. I'll never buy another one. I've had other so-called portable drives, like a Kanagroo and drives in removeable cadies and they all of those being much older and having much more use never have failed. It IS the design. Don't expect Maxtor to admit it.

Oops... almost forgot, yes I click on the icon, then remove both the firewire and power cable.

"There is absolutely no danger in dismounting a drive and then choosing not to unplug it."
According to Billy Boy there is... So I should be able to simply click on the "SAFELY REMOVE HARDWARE" and turn off my computer (including the Maxtor)and when I turn my system back on, power up the Maxtor and it will be all fine...?? To me it seems like the logical thing to do, not to unplug the firewire everytime I use the system, not that I mind it. I just don't want to damage my Maxtor.

MoBetta

Does Windows "see" your Maxtor drive if you leave it plugged in the next time you boot? That's issue one. I can not. Never have. According to what Maxtor told me, that's the way it is suppose to be. A firewire drive needs to be mounted, much like a virtual drive. Otherwise it never gets assigned a drive letter by the operating system. So while it may be "on", you won't be able to use it, unless it is mounted and in my experience you can not mount it unless you plug in the firewire cable AFTER you are up and running. The common term 'hot swapable' simpy means you can add or remove a drive while your PC is running. Still, there is a right and wrong way to add/remove hardware devices. In fact if you attempt to remove a device without unmounting, Windows will (or should) remind you not to do that for the reasons I mentioned. If you don't see such warnings then something may be missing form your setup. Just searching my memory prior to my going to XP and NTFS, the very very first time installing the Maxtor drive, about a year ago it was not seen by Windows. A quick call to Matrox told me to download a Windows patch that installed the 'safely remove' icon to the Task Tray. This "feature" is now part of W2000, ME and XP.

Issue two is unmounting. To "safely" turn off a mounted drive it must be unmounted prior to turning off power to the drive. Simply turning off the drive runs the risk that Windows may have been reading or writing to the drive or some file be left open in which case file coruption can happen.

Lastly, Microsoft acknowledges there IS A PROBLEM with your computer not responding when trying to remove hardware. I know... I've experienced it and offered my fix, don't have Windows Explorer open in the mounted drive regardless if any application is active or not. See Knowledgebase article "#Q305885 Computer Does Not Respond After You Use "Safely Remove Hardware" to Remove External Hard Disk Drive."

The reason I'm kind of making a big deal out of this is because I have suffered failures and know a lot of you also use the Maxtor and if you spent hours, sometimes days or weeks on a project, not being able to recover it can really get you PO'ed. I also don't store the project files on the removeable drive, only the finished version and then only after I burn a copy to a CD first.

Finally in my experience what is interesting is neither the original or replacement drive itself fails. The drives are fine. The problem is the cheesy interface card that Maxtor uses. That is what fails from the constant pushing/pulling in/out of the power supply plug, because the little card is right behind the plugs. The drive inside the case is just a standard Maxtor drive with a different jumper setup. The label on the drive gives you the information to convert it to a regular drive either as master/slave which I'm going to do when the 2nd replacement fails, which will probably happen in another 4-6 months.

>>>Does Windows "see" your Maxtor drive if you leave it plugged in the next time you boot? That's issue one. I can not. Never have. According to what Maxtor told me, that's the way it is suppose to be. A firewire drive needs to be mounted, much like a virtual drive. Otherwise it never gets assigned a drive letter by the operating system. So while it may be "on", you won't be able to use it, unless it is mounted and in my experience you can not mount it unless you plug in the firewire cable AFTER you are up and running. .....<<<<<<

Please don't take this as an argument ! I think there some issues here that need to be resolved....

Thus far my experience with my Maxtor 80G firewire drive is completely different than yours. I powered it up (power and firewire), turned the computer on and bingo! It shows up everytime I boot up. I use it to capture video via my Canopus ADVC-100 with zero frame 'dropage'. The only problem I've had with it is that VV3 sometimes has a problem syching audio and video if there are multiple clips on the timeline and the clips are on the Maxtor external (I have two other Maxtors - internal).
I tried the process you described of powering up and down and decided that I'd just leave the thing on using the old "if it aint broke..." theory. Maybe I'm playing with fire here especially after reading your experiences with the Maxtor. I get the feeling that there are hardware issues here that need to be examined so...

I have
Athlon 1.2G (slightly overclocked)
ASUS A7V133 (266 FSB)
512MB 133 RAM
VisionTek Gforce2MX AGP
Soundblaster Live (ugh)
Adaptec Fire Connect Plus
WinTV (el cheapo)
US Robotics 56k Internal Modem
Mitsumi CDRW
Pioneer 106s DVD player

Win XP 'home'

The whole mess is 'home brew'.

Lets compare notes.

Interesting. So you can leave the firewire cable in and your system sees the Maxtor drive if you reboot or do a cold restart? I can not regardless if under Windows 98SE, ME or XP on four different systems. I think is is more an operating system thing or BIOS rather then hardward. All my systems have a cheap SiGG Firewire PCI card that works fine with the drive and my DV camera.

No... it does not matter - cold boot - restart- switch user - log off/log in. The drive is always there. In another life I made my living programming and we used to (and I imagine programmers still) blame hardware for problems.... but this does 'feel' like some kind of hardware issue. I wish I could bring my drive over to your place, plug it in to one of your systems and see what happens. I also wonder if maybe the stars have to be aligned just right for this thing to work (hope not).

I just spoke to Maxtor and I was assured there is no need to unplug or remove ( via the upper right icon or physically from the firewire port)the drive and that it's totally safe to simply turn off the power, via surge protector, after closing all applications and files. As long as the driver loads up properly in the first place, it should not be a problem.

I am now following those steps and it seems to be better, not corrupting files, but my system still freezes when using V.V. or even while browsing on the net.

Anyone experiencing the same problems with Western Digital's unit????

MoBetta