Hi Moose,
>>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.
Well, yes, but I don't use it on the road. A friend recently asked me
to play the music at his party, so I ripped a pile of CDs, copied them
to the little hard drive (which was sitting firmly on a desk),
unplug-move-plug and I've got everything in another place. Fits into a
shirt pocket. And when they're not in use, it's quite safe to move hard
drives.
But your point is of course very valid regarding laptop use. I drag my
laptop to the other room sometimes, because my printer is there & it's
not connected to the network. I tend to be very careful when moving
laptops, but I've seen other people behave differently (don't compute &
drive !). Not to mention laptops that accidentally power on while in a
backpack...
> 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.
Wow. Which brand is that ?
> 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?
It's an external cage with a drive I had laying around, not a pre-built
external drive. And it's the trademark ElCheapo brand. Probably that's
the reason. I'll be swapping that drive with my current, faster, bigger
laptop drive when my new PC arrives and see what it gives.
Peter.
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