Corrupt folders/files on external HDD

[Luke Garfield]

I know most of us deal with computers in this game and some of you might even be in IT related day jobs. I have been getting "back up" happy lately because I am really seeing the $$ value on not losing projects (not from experience thankfully).

I recently purchased a 3.5" external case IDE, firewire and usb2. I installed a 160GB (western digital) drive into it. Thankfully I was working on a personal project and only lost some rough vocal takes. Thought that it couldn't happen again, re-recorded the takes and lost them again!! Thankfully this time round I'd mixed down the files onto a different HDD (the time b4 I had just finished mix downs and was burning them - grrrr).

So that night I went to the merry land of ebay and bought a brand spanking new 250GB HDD (western digital), installed it into the case. Working like a charm - just about to burn off some mixes and stuff me the folder I'm working in becomes corrupted - before my eyes. I quickly tried to copy the project file across to my other drive and just as I go to do it the drive dismounts itself completely corrupting the folder. Thankfully I retrieved some of the files with checkdsk. But obviously I have some problems.

2 things that I can deduct:

The case is faulty

When I use Nero to burn off the disc the folder that nero looks at seems to get corrupted.

Any help, thoughts and insight appreciated and I really don't want to spend all night googling this problem.

Thanks!

[JulienG]

As one of those with a day job in IT...

The case is faulty

Probably. Even these days we're still seeing some, however two things to try are external power (if you're not using it already), and a different machine.

We got some 2.5" cases in a few weeks ago that work on my machine but not (reliably) on a co-workers, which would be fine except that we have identical IBM machines...

One nice thing you can do on a lot of current machines is to use eSATA all of the benefits of an internal drive but easily swappable.

[Martin]

bad week for western digital drives...

had one go belly up never to return (a backup drive but with about 50mb worth of certian mixdowns we'll never get back)


a good case is a good starting point... the cheapies seem to blow power supplies and overheat, cabling isn't crash hot and the don't do firewire as well as the lacie drives etc

[Luke Garfield]

Well I have done a little more research and I think the chip set on board is the issue. The is a 2 year technical blog on this specific Prolific chipset and the woes and cries of a hundred or more burdened souls who have lost data and partitions to this drive not to mention slow transfer speeds. Regardless. i have a new firmware update and I am going to format from a desktop PC ide bus as "they" say that it helps .

My favourite part was when I back up all my stuff to another couple of partitions and then in my haste deleted those partitions. JOY!! Thankfully a powerful little (free) utility TestWin 6.3 saved me and restored the 3 partitions completely. YAY!! I was in the running for the "Stupid things I've done so you don't do them" thread - which by the way, Mark or Rick if ur reading this maybe we should open a thread or forum on stupid things we've done so others don't do them for the amusement of our collegues and their comfort??

[smash]

As one of the Day job i.t. crowd, the advise I will give you is the same that we use in both the companies I work for...

Don't use cases.

The company I work for has ceassed using any kind of case what so ever, becuase we were getting an alarmingly high failure rate, regardless of different brand/models.

Some are definately better than others, but for any kind of high workload requirements, none of the exernal cases seemed to have the heat dissapation required for actual multimedia use.

They are fine for a cheap secondary backup, but none seem to be actually designed for continual high stress use.

The only drives we use now are the Lacie D2 series, we currently have over 60 of them, and have had no data loss to date.

Please note I said the D2 drives, not the Porsche, which when we tried seemed to have only a slightly smaller failure rate to the cases.

This is not a blatant plug for Lacie, but it is my advise on a product that I know to work.

I honestly don't see the economy in buying cheap(er) hard drives, the ammount that you save is evaporated the first time you loose a session.

We all here try to get the best gear we can, why risk those sounds on sub-standard storage.

[Kris]

Crap. I have a Porsche drive as my archive drive.

[Kurt]

I bought a 3 dollar usb2 -> ide adapter off ebay, it works a treat. The power supply that came with it was rubbish, it doesn't even provide enough grunt to spin a drive up. I'd suggest trying a beefier power supply with the case you have. (got an old at power supply lying around?)

I use a removable HDD caddy plugged into the adapter to transfer files from my Fostex D2424 to my PC, hot swapping is so much better than when I had the caddy attached to the onboard ide port. Having said that, usb transfer isn't as fast as ide but it beats multiple reboots to transfer a set.

All those storage devices use drives from the same small pool of suppliers (LaCie appear to use Western Digital and Seagate drives)

JulianG's esata suggestion would be the best if your machine supports it.

[smash]

Crap. I have a Porsche drive as my archive drive.

Don't worry Mr A...

They are fine as archive drives, fine for backup, it's only when you try to use them as your main recording drive for long sessions at full load that they seem to develop problems.