Peter Leyssens wrote:
>>I have a 180 gig LaCie Firewire drive. I've used it throughout the
>>last year at school. It's always been cranky. I should have seen the
>>signs. The thing sat there grinding away forever tonight when I
>>turned it on and when it was done the drive was completely blank
>>except for a few corrupted files from one folder.
>>
OUCH!. I hope most of it can be recreated without too much hassle.
>I'm sorry for you. Despite all the discussions here about external
>drives being the most reliable, I'm losing my faith in them. I have a
>small 2.5" one that is very practical because it's so small.
>
I've never bought that idea. Why would the same drive in a portable case
be more reliable? There's a lot of spinning and flying around by
relatively delicate little mechanical parts going on in there. There are
simply going to be more occurances of bumps, radial acceleration, etc.
in that environment than in a big, heavy, stable desktop case.
I recently read about the things being done by the big portable computer
makers to make their HDDs reliable. I don't remember it all, but one
example is built-in accelerometers, so the drive can park heads and spin
down the motor BEFORE it lands. One of the few reasons I can see to pay
the premium prices for a couple of brands.
>But after a few months of use, the file system gets corrupted. I hardly move
>it
>around. But from discussions about the NextoCF backup device, I learned
>that Windows doesn't shut down the drive properly: when I unplug it from
>USB, the drive needs to do an emergency shutdown (which includes yanking
>the heads to a safe position with a strong spring).
>
Sounds like sour grapes by a manufacturer that hasn't done their
home/design work. Whether or not it is ideal, and much about Windoze is
not ideal :-) , how Windows shuts down a drive on a USB port has to be
very well known to peripheral makers. Whether it is ideal or not, it's
the reality of the environment in which their product will be used. Why
doesn't their driver/firmware do the right thing, parking heads and
spinning down, when the USB port driver is shut down? Windows doesn't
say "it's now safe to remove the drive" until it has notified the driver
and received a response from it. It is the driver and firmware's
responsibility to get the drive ready for the inevitable physical
disconnect. In fact, I think they should do so before telling Windoze
they are ready.
Moose
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