"Given these drives unfortunately fail more than IDE or SATA internal drives"

mfhau: My experience with external firewire drives does not support your statement as a "givien". I have six external enclosures - three Maxtors - the type that are not designed to swap drives in and out of - I open these up to swap drives all the time, no problem - and three ADS enclosures.

These enclosures have been in service on my system ranging from three to four years. Once in that time, I encountered a Windows XP system error that locked me out of the data on one of the drives. In that instance, I used a utility "Get Data Back Now" to retrieve and then copy the data onto another drive before reformatting the damaged drive. That problem was a Windows problem, not any fault of the drive, itself. The drive once formatted worked fine, and is in service to this day.

The drives I use in these enclosures are all EIDE drives - no different than those installed internally in my system. Some are Maxtors, others WD. I haven't had a problem with any of them. ADS enclosures provide a fan, so, I presume the drives in those don't run as hot as anything I put in the Maxtor enclosurs - those get hot enough that you can't handle the drives with your bare hands whcn swapping them out until they have time to cool down. Nonetheless, these drives must be able to withstand that temperature, or Maxtor would not have designed the cases as they have, and my drives would have fried a long time ago.

I'm happy with, and rely daily upon all of my external firewire enclosures.

You you don't state how old the failed Maxtor was - had it seen significant service prior to being used in the enclosure - or did it fail early in your two-year use of these enclosures?

Just curious. In some 15 years of heavy computer usage, I have personally only experienced two drive failures - one was the drive in a brand new HP computer. HP help had to be convinced that I knew that about which I was speaking, but, they finally relented and sent me out a new drive on the provision that I return the oritinal to them.

The other drive was on a server at my office. It was in a system that was eight years old, had been running nonstop all that time. It finally gurgled to a stop and had to be replaced.

I'm not looking to pick a fuss with you, just sharing my opinion that we live in pretty amazing times - where, what should be very high-wear items, are designed and produced to such exacting standards that failure is extremely rare.

In my house, I bet we spend more on light bulb replacement that we do on hard drives (why can they not make a lightbulb that lasts?? I don't get it).

Thanks for the thread.
Caruso

I use an external Seagate 160gb everyday. Recently purchased a Seagate external 400gb. I have no problems capturing video to either one of them. Both drives seem to be just as fast as my internal drives. I can also move the external drives to any computer very quickly.

I think the problem can be traced to "bad" controller circuity either part of the external drive or on some enclosures. I had three Maxtrox "externals" one right after the other fail, the drive inside never failed and the removable drive "drawer" I use now have never failed either.

My failed Maxtor was after two years (one year warranty in Australia).
My comment was based on the odd posts I see from time to time regarding failed firewire drives and the bad time people have getting replacements or trying to get their data off. As you don't see posts concerrning internal ide or sata failures anywhere near as much.
The follwing seems to back up the argument:

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=335545

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=342545

ans it isn't hard to find more - search on Maxtor

Anyway - I'm happy with this technology and yes agree we live in amazing times. Btw we have 6 Maxtor drives.

In the time that I've used external enclosures, I had one that simply refused to enumerate, no matter what HD I inserted into it. That was an ADS enclosure. A call to their support line got me a return authorization and ultimately led to a free replacement.

What seemed like a similar problem with one of my Maxtor enclosures resulted in the Maxtor techie telling me that the tailpiece was to blame (that would be consistent with BillyBoy's post). I went out and bought a new enclosure, but, packrat that I am, hang onto the old one.

It turned out to be a Windows XP problem that was solved with a patch - supposedly corrected in SP2. I now use both the new and the old enclosure with consistent success.

Just be certain you don't take as gospel those doomsday messages you get from XP about "write delay" failures and lost data or drives that need to be reformatted.

A reboot of the computer usually reestabilshes the connection, and I have yet to lose data, even when the drive is corrupted so as to make in inaccessible to XP.

Good luck to you.

Caruso

External hard drive reliability....where do I start?

My external drives are the core of my business. Without them I would be hard pressed to do anything. This is primarily because my editing system is a 17" HP laptop. I have been burned several times due to "Delayed Write Failed" errors or when a drive has failed to enumerate. This has been across different laptops, drives, drive enclosures, cables, OS installs, and updates. To put it simply, Microsoft still has a long ways to go to make external drives as reliable as internals. Don't think for a second that they are, because they aren't. Some people have problems, some people don't. The sad part about the whole thing is everything is running along just fine and wham! Hey! Where's my drive? Why won't it come up? Scandisk says it can't complete the scan! Corrupted!?!?!?! Been there, done that, lost the projects. Get Data Back Now may or may not work. It's been 50/50 for me.

I'll also mention that it's not exclusive to Firewire or USB 2.0. They both can trash your data equally bad. I used to think it was a Firewire issue.

The best solution I've come up with is to put everything on its own bus. Don't daisy chain unless you have to. I run the hard drives on a Firewire 800 cardbus adapter, the external preview from the notebook's internal Firewire 400 interface, and the DVD burner from a USB 2.0 connection. This helps minimize problems a great deal.

John

I agree Microsoft has miles to go to get things right. Remember the "master" drive I mentioned in another thread that was preventing Windows to boot simply because I requested Windows to a check disk on it. Well, I thought it was past having booted it on another PC and it doing the pale blue screen "checking" the disk. Then as I said I put it back in the original system and it worked, till this morning and then Windows ws showing this drive with Delayed write errors. Again rebooting, Windows without me asking decided on its own to scan this drive again, and once it did, it seems to be running normally again. The point is I doubt anything is wrong with this drive, but Windows being Windows thinks there is, but only sometimes.

I've found a LOT of the issues were related to the Enable LBA flag. Get this thing wrong and drives appear to work just fine for a while. I suspect when the LBA goes past the limit is when you start to get problems.
From my limited understanding of the issue some drives / controllers handle this issue internally but also Windoz will have a go as well and things can get very muddied plus I think something in the BIOS gets into the act. After a fair bit of experimenting all 1394 drives work fine, I can pull them out of the 1394 enclosures and plug them into the main beast without issue but before that it was hell. We'd get so many hours of capturing and then hit a Delayed Write Error.
Bob.

so, what's the easiest way to make backups of external drives: write to a bunch of DVDs, or just buy more external drives and keep those as backups?

ken