Digital BW, The Print

It also occurs with USB.  That goes through windows drivers as well.
Actually, one of my lost drives was on a USB2.0 port; they are all NTFS
formatted FWIW.
In my experience, the corruption occurs while writing the disk.  BTW, I do
not have the well-known delayed write XP problem that you can read about on
Microsoft support.

I use the drives to archive as well.  I believe that if you successfully
write the disk, and verify it, you are fine.  This is not a hardware problem
with external drives; it's a windows software problem.  I would then
shutdown the drive and turn it off.  This has been a rare thing for me, in
daily use, a drive can go 6 months or more without having it happen, but the
result is a total loss.

Using the drive as your main photo storage, without backup is asking for
disaster in my opinion.  For important images, I backup to DVD; any hard
drive can always suffer a hard failure like a head crash, dropping it, etc.

Best regards,
John Moody

-----Original Message-----
From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of Kip
Babington
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 9:02 AM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Firewire drives (was Re: 2400 vs 2200 using IJC or
QTR)

This is a very troubling comment. I just added and external firewire
drive to archive my digital photos (I'd filled up all my USB ports and
thought it might be a good idea to have some diversity in my hardware
configuration.) Is there some particular activity that triggers the
corruption, or just ordinary use? The drive I'm using is actually a
2-way model, that has both firewire and USB2 connectors, and I suppose I
could add another USB card to the computer if that would provide better
reliability. Any idea what causes the failure?

Cheers,
Kip