Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: External Firewire Hard Discs

This is topic External Firewire Hard Discs - Need Opinions in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-27-2003, 12:13 PM:

I'm having some headaches trying to capture MiniDV-format video to my computer, and I think the main culprit is the hard disc installed in my nearly 3-year old Dell PC.

The IDE drive apparently does not have the oomph to sustain the nearly 4MB/sec rate required for MiniDV. So I wind up with video that has dropped frames and even captured past the out point I set on timecode. On the surface, it would seem that getting an external Firewire hard disc might solve the problem. But I cannot find any definitive proof from web-searching that such a drive will do the trick. Do any Film-Tech members have any experience with this?

Some might suggest buying a new computer. I'm not buying a new computer for at least several more months. Prices for things like Serial ATA hard drives and good video cards are too high right now. And there's a number of pending developments that make the act of buying a new computer right now not that great an idea.

Finally, just as a troubleshooting measure, does it matter if you have a Firewire card hooked up to the computer's power supply or not? I can't pull one of my free power supply connectors all the way down to attach to the Belkin PCI Firewire card. But that wouldn't seem to matter. My camcorder only attaches via a 4-pin I-Link cable, not a 6-pin jack providing power. Most external Firewire hard discs have 6-pin jacks; however, they also typically have their own external power hook up too.

Anyway, I need some input about this issue. Firewire drives from Lacie, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc. all cost over $200. So I want to be sure if I spend that money it will be a good investment.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 09-27-2003, 12:56 PM:

Bobby, would the new hard drives with 8 megs of chache help? I don't know....just a thought. I just bought a 160 gig Maxtor UDMA ultra ATA/133 7200RPM but I have not installed it yet. The drive costed 160 bucks.

I had two of these style drives from Western Digital but they failed too soon like a Western Digital seems fail. When Western Digital sent me replacements, they played "Switcheroo" on me and sent me 2 meg cache drives. [Mad]

So I never really had the chance to try them. The orginal ones didn't last long enough.

[Frown]

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 09-27-2003, 01:05 PM:

Western Digital = BAD!
I've always had good luck with the Maxtors.

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 09-27-2003, 01:47 PM:

I have to agree with Mike, every Western Digital I've seen seems to fail after 2-3 years in some form.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-27-2003, 01:52 PM:

Now that you mention it, I kind of suspect that Dell did the same "switcheroo" on my PC. Last year, the original 80GB HDD that came with my 1GHz PIII system started to fail and needed to be replaced. The replacement drive just doesn't move data anywhere near as well. I'm certain the original drive had a larger data cache in it. I'll bet this replacement has no more than a 1MB or 2MB cache, especially with the way it hangs and drops frames in Adobe Premiere.

I may give Dell a call about this since my system is still under warranty (at least until November).

Still, it would be nice to know if external Firewire HDD units work well for capturing MiniDV streams. The external unit would provide hot-pluggable convenience and a fast way to back up large amounts of data. I have looked at a variety of models. The ones Iomega sells seem like crap (small capacities, high prices and slow rotational speeds). Maxtor and Lacie seem to have some more attractive models, with 200GB and 250GB capacities. Most external Firewire drives I see basically contain an UltraIDE-based disc converted over to Firewire connection. At least the Lacie and Maxtor models I've seen on the web feature 7200rpm speeds.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 09-27-2003, 02:40 PM:

Fry's is having a sale on WD 160gig 7200RPM drives with 8MB cache for $89 this week.

So far I have yet to have a WD die. All of my Maxtors died within a few months of the warranty. I just had two of them die this month, yet they were stamped "warranty through Aug03". Maxtor [puke]

Bobby, your hard drive is most probably the issue here.

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 09-27-2003, 02:44 PM:

I use Mercury Elite FireWire drives from www.otherworldcomputing.com for my Apple computers but I'd bet these will work on a PC.

First of all, I don't think it's the IDE spec that's at fault because the drive inside a FireWire portable will be an IDE drive routed through an adapter.

It could be your Dell. [Roll Eyes]

For video, I use 7200rpm IBM DeskStar drives. I don't use the Maxtors for video work. I like the portability of the external FW drives. We do a lot of our editing work on different machines and this makes it easy to take the files around.

A few years back there was some concern about using drives larger than 60GB but I'm currently using 60GB, 80GB and 120GB with no problems (so far). Some colleagues have claimed getting good results with 5400rpm but I'd never personally try it.

You also have the option of buying the case so that you could use a drive of your own choosing. I don't have much experience with other FW cases but we've had excellent results with the Oxford 911 bridge which we started buying after doing some web research.

I have also purchased 5400rpm drives for my iTunes MP3 Library and recently I added a few of the little FireWire drives (2.5") to my collection just to have for portability. I love those little guys! [Cool]

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 09-27-2003, 04:33 PM:

Westenn Digital tend to be my IDE disk of choice; I've had a couple fail over the years, but that is out of several hundred, many remaining in use for many years. Most modern hard disks seem to be pretty good, we don't have many fail, the main exception being a batch of a hundred or so Fujitsu ones which were failing at a rate of one or two each week. This was a known problem, and the manufacturer of the computers replaced all the remaining ones with Maxstor. So far, I don't think any of those have failed.

Our SCSI server disks are mainly Seagate, IBM and Fujitsu. We have about 80 of these in use at the moment, and get about one failure every year or two.

I only have one Firewire drive, a Smartdisk Firelite 20GB. pocket sized one which I use mainly to move large files between work and home. I've only had it about six months, but I wouldn't be without it now. Much better than USB 2.0. It's just a pity that more PCs don't have Firewire as standard.

I can't comment on how Firewire drives perform for video work, it's not something I'm involved in.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-27-2003, 05:56 PM:

I agree Brad, I am pretty sure the internal hard disc is the problem. It is very likely my original disc had 8MB of cache and this one has maybe 1MB or 2MB. Dell's customer support is giving me the runaround on it too. I called to verify what they put into my machine versus what was originally in there. The guy tried to tell me it had something to do with Windows software or some baloney like that and switched me over to software support before I could even say anything. The asshole.

I just wish I could find more documentation or reviews regarding external hard drives and how well they work at capturing digital video streams. I visited the Staples and Office Depot stores here in Lawton. The only external hard discs they had were USB 2.0 capable Maxtor units (a 40GB model for $120 and an 80GB model for $170). If I could verify that a 40GB USB 2.0 drive would take MiniDV data as fast the camera could feed it, then I would probably just buy that and call it a day. But I would really prefer to keep it all all-Firewire data flow if possible.

Staples had an 80GB 7200rpm 8MB cache Maxtor internal IDE drive for $69 after rebate. But buying a new internal hard disc would mean a complete reinstall of all my system software, which will take a lot of time. So I'm still a little tempted to go with an external model. But I can't find anything anywhere that will verify whether those damned things work or not for reliably capturing video from a camcorder.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-28-2003, 02:16 AM:

Older WD drives were very good, but the reports that I've been reading lately have said that they've pretty much become crap. They are noisy, too.

Bobby, although Firewire hard drives usually do work, I'd recommend against it. Just get a 7200 rpm internal ATA of your choice and that'll be that. You don't have to replace the existing drive, just use this one for capture. It's always recommended to use a different drive than your OS drive for your media files, anyway. MUCH more reliable at capturing. I have read that when using a Firewire drive to capture, you are more likely to get dropped frames. Everyone on the DV and Apple forums bitching about dropped frames ALWAYS have external firewire drives. I have never had a single dropped frame since moving up to the G4 (the ol' crusty G3 with it's 5400rpm drive which was also the OS drive gave me three or four dropped frames 4 or 5 years ago). Also, you can just install a PCI firewire card (which you probably already have) and that way you don't need an extra power supply connection. The camera plugs directly into the card and there you have it. Or you could just wait a few months and get a nice Mac with all that crap taken care of (if you are purchasing a computer for video editing, that is). Of course, Macs are worthless without Final Cut Pro and the assortment of programs like that! iMovie does not count. Neither does iDVD!

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 09-28-2003, 03:07 AM:

Seriously - consider getting a Mac. This stuff is waaaay easier with a Mac. Even the low-end Macs from 3-4 years ago can do video with no problem.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 09-28-2003, 03:07 AM:

Bobby, [fu]

Dell. Whether you have a WD, Maxtor, or whatever...if you call the drive manufacturer rep and give them the model number, they will tell you exactly what you have. I have to agree with Joe. The older drives by WD were really great.

Brad, some people swear by Maxtor, some swear at them. I swear by them. On the other side of the coin, some people swear at Western Digital and some swear by them. I swear at them.

All of my shit (including this machine) is equipped with Maxtors.

Just like Ford and Shovrolets. [Wink]

True....I have had some good Western Digital drives. However, I had more WD drives fail than Maxtors..both at home as well as work. Most of the WD problems - they wouldn't "spin up."

The switcharoo 120 Gig replacements Western Digital sent me seem to be OK...I gave one of them to Josh, and I used the other in my storage machine. But I still think Maxtor rocks! [Smile]

Manny,

Macs. They might be good machines....but you'll pay through the ass for software. Hardly nothing fits....everything seems to be orientated to the IBM compatible...in otherwords...yes...MacroShaft. Ever since I installed Winblos 2000 Pro in this machine, it has been running flawlessly. That has been since the Winblos 2000 hit the market. I have done some nasty things to it, but it just keeps running and running. Don't forget..."Billy Boy" has a good chunk of stock in Apple. He is writing software for them, too. [Wink]

Because of the way Winblos 2000 Pro has been running, I have no desire to buy anything else that fits this thing, let alone a Mac.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-28-2003, 05:49 AM:

If you want to do video editing for the Mac, you'll need some software. Final Cut Pro = $1000. Cinema Tools = $1000. Livetype, Soundtrack & Compressor = another few hundred bucks each. Oh wait. Final Cut Pro 4 includes all of those programs for $1000. If you have any older version of FCP (even version 1) you can get FCP4 (with all it's included programs) for $400.

Of course if you're not into "mega serious" video editing and just do it as a passtime or hobby, then every Mac already includes iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, iTunes, iSync and tons of other stuff that are great for the casual user (stuff I really don't use). [Smile]

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 09-28-2003, 06:13 AM:

IDE disks are very cheap now, buying a large, fast Internal drive would be much cheaper than an external drive. Firewire boxes are useful for moving work around though.

Joe, the machines we have been buying recently, last year or so have had Maxstor drives, seem ok so far, but it's still early days. The last WD I bought was for my home machine a few months ago, to repair it after the power supply blew up (literally!) and distroyed various other parts in the process. That one seems fine, and is quiet. If WD have gone downhill in recent times, then it's bad news. [Frown]

I remember the first hard disk we bought at my previous job. It was an external unit, in a case abuout the size of a 5U rack mount device. I don't know what the interface on the drive itself was, but there was a SASI bridge controller in the box, by which it was connected to the 8 bit Z-80 based server. There was space in the box to fit a second drive, but we couldn't afford it, and we thought we would never fill the first drive, after all, it was so huge, 16MB formatted! We wouldn't buy one of those 5 or 10 MB. ones, we were into serious data storage!

Before you could move the thing you had to remove the lid of the box, and turn a wheel on the side of the drive to park the heads. If you so much as sneezed near the thing it would crash. This cost about five thousand pounds, and that was only about twenty years ago. How things change.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-28-2003, 11:06 AM:

I opened up my case and got my hard drive unclamped out of the machine to see its model type, a Maxtor D740X-6L. That ATA 133 80GB turns out to have only a 2MB cache, which is pretty much what I expected. I'm certain the drive before had an 8MB buffer.

Last night, I purchased a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 80GB hard drive for $70 (price after a $30 rebate I have to mail). That one at least has an 8MB buffer.

As far as hooking it up as a slave unit, I'm not sure how I'll be able to manage that. I think the DVD-ROM drive, CD-RW and floppy take up all the rest of my IDE channels. I have seen the recommendations from various NLE software stating you should capture to a separate physical drive. So I guess now I need to look at buying an external DVD-ROM or something like that to free up one of those IDE cables.

Posted by Ron Lacheur (Member # 1126) on 09-28-2003, 12:18 PM:

Floppy has it's own channel.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 09-28-2003, 12:19 PM:

Bobby, the floppy does not normally use IDE, it has its own interface on a separate bus. I think LS-120 drives, which could read ordinary floppy disks as well, had an IDE interface, and old Apple Mac's used something totally different, but I'd be surprised if your floppy was IDE.

It is possible to have three IDE channels, each with master and slave devices; I've never seen it done, and I don't know of any machine that has it built in, so you'd need an extra card to get the tertiary channel. Not all cards can be configured in this way, but some can.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 09-28-2003, 01:57 PM:

Bobby, get an ATA controller card. It will handle 4 additional drives in addition to what you have. Maxtor and Promise Technologies have them. I have one of each and they work equally well.

All you need is a spare PCI slot.

Maxtor's Ultra ATA/133 PCI Adapter only costs about 60 bucks. The card will also allow the drive to come up to maximum capacity without partitioning. I have a 120 gig drive in my Pentium 75 (gasp) on a Promise Technology card. Full cpapcity - no partitions.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-28-2003, 02:24 PM:

After closer inspection, it turns out my PC has a floppy that doesn't run on IDE. So I'm pretty sure I can just mount the new drive in an empty HDD bay above where the floppy sits and attach the boot drive and new slave drive on the same Ultra ATA cable.

I would consider getting a PCI-based host adapter. However, I have only one PCI slot left and that would create a really cramped up cabling situation. I've already got Ultra ATA 133 speed on my main board-based controller. So it just seems like an easier solution. I'll probably install this new slave drive later on this evening after I get some other work done.

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 09-28-2003, 03:03 PM:

Your Dell's ATA133 interface will handle an 80GB drive partitioned and formated as a single NTFS volume.

By the way, for anyone considering a Promise controller... most of their ATA controllers (especially the TX-2000) don't work reliably in systems that have nVidia chipset based video controllers.

Posted by Jon Bartow (Member # 241) on 09-28-2003, 03:37 PM:

The standard configuration for PC motherboards includes the following : 1 floppy connector that can handle two floppy drives (A: and B:), a Primary IDE connector and a Secondary IDE connector. Both IDE connectors can have two IDE devices connected to them (one Slave and one Master). So without an add on controller card you could have two floppy drives and up to four IDE drives

Posted by Ken McFall (Member # 845) on 09-28-2003, 04:55 PM:

Hi Bobby,

you should consider very carefully how you mount your new drive. Any two drives on an single IDE channel will default to the 'SLOWEST SPEED' of the two. So your new '133' drive may in fact run at '100' or even '66'. NEVER put a hard drive and a CD drive on the same channel for the same reason.

Your easiest option may be to buy a new IDE controller card, Promise make good reasonable priced 133 cards for up to four drives. Put it in and it will configure itself. Attach any new hard drives you have on to it and they will run at their fastest speed, leaving your existing drives as they are.

Where possible you should set your windows 'Virtual memory' to a seperate physical drive so it can be accessed at the same time and therefore faster that using the same drive or partition that windows is installed on.

IDE drives can cope well with video capture provided every link in the chain is at it's optimum setting. Some software allows you to specify which drive the memory cache for capture should be placed. Again make this a physically different drive to windows for faster reading & writing.

Finally make sure you have as few processes running in the background, XP has a huge number. Turn off everything you don't actually need and the difference will be very noticable.

Using external interfaces will, in general, give lower performance than internal drives provided everything is set correctly.

Posted by Matt Hale (Member # 1518) on 09-28-2003, 05:51 PM:

The critical component in any firewire drive that determines the speed is the bridge chip that converts the firewire bus interface into the ata drive interface. Most ata harddrives these days can sustain 45MB/sec +/- and firewire 400 can sustain 50MB/sec but most bridge chips can only do about 5-6MB/sec.

The only bridge chip that can handle 50MB/sec is the Oxford 911, or in the case of firewire 800, the Oxford 922. It can be very difficult sometimes to find out what bridge chip comes in a case, but it sure pays to ask. My favorite type of firewire case is actually a no-name tiwanese import that is resold by several companies in north america, including OWC and Unibrain and various others. Its easily recognizable.

The only harddrive I trust at the moment is the Seagate. Every Western Digital I have ever owned has died. Maxtors can be good, but its really hit-and-miss. Hitachi (formerly IBM) DeskStars are known as DeathStars for a reason too.

Processor speed can also have a major effect on performace of internal and external drives. For example, the same firewire drive that manages 14-15MB/sec on my old 233Mhz G3 sustains 47MB/sec on my new 2x1.25GHz G4. Same drive and, for the sake of the test, same firewire card (an old Unibrain)

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-28-2003, 06:53 PM:

I installed the new drive and am still have some of the same glitches with gaps being dropped out of the video when capturing. It makes me wish there were some way to slowly take the video data off the tape in binary form, but apparently nothing works like that.

There are a couple other possible variables at play causing some of this trouble. I updated my Zone Alarm and Norton Anti Virus software to their latest versions. I assume I should have that stuff disabled when capturing. Also, the AC adapter for my camera is defective, so I have been running it with only the battery. Does video capture typically pull more juice than a typical camcorder battery can provide?

As many hangups as there are with this stuff, I can see why the pros are still spending tens of thousands of dollars on rack mount hardware.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 09-28-2003, 07:53 PM:

Bobby, if you are running Windows 98 or ME, you'll never get it to run the way you want to. Something about how the memory resources are handled, I guess.

For what it is worth, the person who wrote the DOS-based program we use for our on-air computers tried to write one that would work in a Windows 98 enviroment. He was not successful. Too many glitches. When Windows 2000 was released, he was able to make it work. From what I understand, XP, XP Pro, and 2000 handle memory allocations completely different than 98.

I might be all wet on this, but people like Daryl is much more qualified to address your problem than I am. Hopefully what I said in the above paragraph will trigger a bell in Daryl's head.

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 09-28-2003, 07:57 PM:

Like Ken said above, try having your new drive setup as the only device on the IDE channel so you know wether or not the other device on that channel is causing your problem.

So, for now... hook up your drive by itself on IDE2 as the master drive and see if you get better performance out of it.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-29-2003, 12:17 AM:

So let me get this straight. I was under the impression you could have no more than 4 IDE devices installed in a computer system. Also, I have been assuming if you have a motherboard based IDE controller, then you would need to disable it in BIOS to install a new PCI IDE controller card. Ken, your comments suggest very much otherwise.

If I can leave my existing IDE devices installed in my main board controller and then put the new ATA133 drive in a PCI controller then that might solve a big part of the problem. Seems worth a shot anyway since Ultra ATA 133 PCI controllers are not very expensive. I'll have to look a little harder at the Maxtor and Promise models.

Of course another thing that has me suspicious is trying to capture video with the palmcorder only running off battery power. I really think there is something to this. While my AC adapter was still working, I did one video capture of about 20 seconds worth of footage. It did drop a single frame here and there, but not the big gaps of footage like it was doing running off battery power. I don't know. Maybe that might be a coincidence.

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 09-29-2003, 12:25 AM:

Newer ATA controllers (nearly all of the ATA133 controllers) can coincide with your onboard controller (you can use both at the same time).

They do this by 'pretending' to be a SCSI interface card.

Once again, if you've got an nVidia chipset based video card, avoid the Promise controllers.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 09-29-2003, 04:28 AM:

Bobby, I ALWAYS use battery power when I capture and export. In fact, I haven't used my XL1's AC adaptor for a few years. All it does is sit there and charge batteries.

I think the problem is that your wallet is too full. Try emptying it out (I'll take the contents) and all should work fine.

Posted by Ken McFall (Member # 845) on 09-29-2003, 05:03 PM:

You can insert another IDE controller card and it will be independant of the on board IDE controller. You have to remember that when they claim multi tsaking for a computer system they do in fact mean time sharing.... each 'system' is given so many clock cycles so you are never really running true multi-tasking. When it worlks it works very well....

Yes try and close as many background applications as possible as they all consume some clock cycles. Anti virus software when doing it job will be very intrusive, after all if its going to catch some illegal action then its got to be busy checking every write to disc!

One of the beauties of windows is its ability to do so many things and interface with so much hardware.... but that's also its downfall.

I have on my Athlon 2800 system....

Two 80 gig 8meg cache drives on IDE 0 & 1.
IDE DVD writer as IDE 2 DVD Reader on IDE 3

On my pronise controller card I have,

80 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 0
80 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 1
60 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 2
80 gig 2 meg cache drive IDE 3

They are paired for IDE performance so the 133 drives share a channel on the main IDE controller. The other drives on the Promise are mainly storage so are no so important.

I have matched the drives for performance so the matching compliments their abilities and don't work against each other.
The CD drives are on a channel on their own so don't affect the system performance.

Hardware is just one side of the equation....you can chase your tail forever if you like.... but you'll never get a perfect system foir every situation.... belive me I've treid and spend a small fortune in the processs. I could have paid off our national debt if I'd not had a computer leeaching the cash from me!

Time for a large G&T [Big Grin]

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-29-2003, 06:59 PM:

quote:
I think the problem is that your wallet is too full. Try emptying it out (I'll take the contents) and all should work fine.

Hehe, I think all the little nickle and dime things here and there are doing a great job of emptying that wallet. $50 for a Firewire card here, $70 for new hard drive, $40 for a new controller, etc. It all adds up. I guess that's what makes a new computer purchase more attractive. But even then when actually having to work one's way through DV-to-computer headaches, there are very few systems set up for DV use right out of the box.

Later edit into post: success! yay! My stuff works now. Earlier this evening, I visited a local computer store and bought a Maxtor Ultra ATA 133 PCI controller and configured that new 80GB drive to that while leaving the rest of my IDE stuff hooked up to the main board controller. Video captures from my little 3CCD Panasonic palmcorder to the disc without any apparent problem (although I haven't tried capturing any especially long clips). The hard disc seems to gobble up all the data just fine --and play it back very smoothly as well.

Thanks to all of you for responding to this thread. I got more help here on this DV-to-PC subject than most any other place I could find on the 'net.

[ 09-30-2003, 12:23 AM: Message edited by: Bobby Henderson ]

Posted by System Notices (Member # 2357) on 07-18-2006, 05:44 AM:

It has been 1022 days since the last post.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 07-18-2006, 05:44 AM:

Three years later, and I've now moved on from Western Digital drives; the last few I've bought have been Samsung, and they've been very good. They're quieter than most of the others, and also seem to run cooler. No problems at all with them yet, but I've only been using them for about six months so far.

250GB. SATA ones are about 75 pounds each in oem packaging.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 07-18-2006, 01:39 PM:

75 pounds? Wow, that's pretty heavy for a hard disc!
[Razz]

I've been waiting out some anticipated price drops for a new external hard disc for my notebook computer. I may cave and get a Maxtor One Touch II or III drive with Firewire 800 capability and 16MB of cache. I'm not necessarily sold on Maxtor, but their external drives have generally earned top scores. Maxtor also recently aquired Seagate. Don't know if that will mean anything.

Another area to ponder is drive size. There's a growing number of 400GB, 500GB, 600GB and 1TB models on the market. But dollar for dollar spent it still seems like 300GB for a little over $200 is still right in the sweet spot on price and capacity.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 07-18-2006, 05:39 PM:

I'm waiting for the ones with 17MB of cache.

Posted by Ron Yost (Member # 1850) on 07-18-2006, 09:29 PM:

A year or so ago I bought a Maxtor One-Touch .. the first model, with USB and Firewire. Crap. Pure unreliable crap. After about three months of -very- occasional use it developed an oscillating head-parking 'click of death' (similar to the original 100-meg Iomega ZIP drives .. which were also crap, IMHO). Zero help from Maxtor. At least Iomega sent me a replacement .. which also died an early death.

This was after endless problems with XP Pro 'forgetting' all about the One-Touch nearly every-other time I wanted to use it. What a nuisance!

I wouldn't buy another, but maybe they've improved?? They can't be much worse. [Mad]

Maxtor.

Ron Yost