After the suggestion of "unknown" - in one of the comments re: the Maxtor One Touch II which I was using with USB - getting "delayed write errors" - I installed a Firewire card - hooked it up to the Maxtor 120 GB drive - and did a huge copy operation that had caused all the problems last time around.
No problems.
And - it seemed faster. I thought that USB 2.0 and Firewire were the same speed. What - 400 megabytes per second or something like that. But stuff was copying much faster.
Thank you "unknown" for the firewire suggestion. Let's see how the rest of the peripherals (still USB) are working tomorrow.
UPDATE: Switching to Firewire was the answer. No problems since the switch 7/25/05
6 comments:
Dave, that was me. I figured since I was the one who brought up the Maxtor drives to begin with, I'd pass along the Firewire advice.
I have one of the original One Touch drives and a newer One Touch II drive. Last week the original died at about 17months of age. So far I am not sure what happened. I'm trying to reformat it as I type.
If I can't salvage it, I will probably buy a raw drive (Seagate, perhaps) and put it in the One Touch case.
I've had drives from just about every manufacturer die over the last 25 years so I just don't know if any are more reliable than the next.
I find that Firewire is much faster than USB 2, also. Those published specs are ideal numbers and not reality. There is typically a lot less going on with your Firewire bus on a Windows system.
Good luck.
By the way, if you have a lot of USB stuff and have a hub, make sure it has its own power supply and you are not pulling power from the USB bus itself...bad things happen otherwise.
Dave, on the USB issue, also make sure none of your periperals other than keyboard or mouse type things pull power only from the bus.
You'll often see claims that some USB stuff like portable drives don't need power other than the bus but that is seldom true in the real world....
"By the way, if you have a lot of USB stuff and have a hub, make sure it has its own power supply and you are not pulling power from the USB bus itself...bad things happen otherwise."
But what is a USB hub? Do I have one? I have two PCI USB cards, each with four sockets. Is that a hub?
Everything is pulling electrical power from a wall socket except for the CF Card Reader which I guess gets it's power from the USB card.
But wow - I had no idea that firewire would prove to be that much faster. I'm using iViewMedia Pro and I created a new catalog - which means that in this case it was parsing through about 10,000 files to make the thumbnails and previews. This is what killed me first time around with write errors. Stuff was popping into the catalog maybe 30% or more faster than with USB.
I also notice two Firewire ports on the Maxtor drive and I'm guessing that you can chain certain Firewire devices. Seems like looking for trouble to me.
Anyway - going to get another cable and run the 4800 through Firewire as well.
THANKS FOR ALL THE ADVICE.
Dave, a hub is a stand-alone little box with several USB plug in points. The hub then has one cable which connects to the PC. I has its own 'wall wart' for power.
For example, here is a combo USB/Firewire hub:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=252081
I have one to give my laptop extra USB/Firewire ports since I can't put PCI cards in the laptop. You should be OK (power handling-wise) since the PCI bus via the PC power supply is handling the needed power.
With standard FireWire you can theoretically connect up to 63 devices together. I have had my two OneTouch drives chained together via the FireWire bus with zero read/write issues.
With the 4800 on Firewire, you will probably notice no increase in speed because Photoshop sends the image data to a buffer in the 4800 (and your hard drive if it won't fit the printer buffer) which happen MUCH faster than the actual printing of ink on paper.
I'm glad I had redundant OneTouch drives last week since it looks like the older one is toast...I can't even get it to reformat.
Thanks Jeff. That's what I figured a hub was - since I have one for my network, but what threw me was that in the device manager, it listed USB Hubs.
Anyway - I'm in Firewire heaven since another problem that the USB/MAXTOR was causing was that the printer (doesn't matter which printer) would sometimes stop halfway through a print if the drive was turned on.
Printing most of the day with no problems.
And yes, data is going to the printer faster than it can put ink on paper.
Dave:
What speed is the Maxtor drive?
I have been told that the problem can be the speed at which the drive spins, 7200 is better than 5400 and also the cache size can matter.
I know you solved the problem but this may be relevant.
Thanks.
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