Digital BW, The Print

John Moody wrote:



Although I do not doubt for a moment that you've had some corrupt 
drives, I am *extremely* skeptical that you have reached a correct 
diagnosis of the cause and origin of the problems.


> On windows, the data goes through windows drivers to
> handle the firewire ports.  

> I have had no such
> corruptions with internal drives, and I write even more data to them, 250
> Gig per day is not unusual.

Odd, since the internal drives also use Windows drivers.

In fact, everything on the machine except the processor uses a Windows 
driver. (And even the processor uses a special Windows driver-like 
thing, called a kernel.)

Also, an external firewire drive may use a Microsoft-provided driver, or 
a vendor-supplied driver. I'd be astonished if your vendor didn't 
provide you with one of their own drivers to support the hardware they 
designed and manufactured.

You need two drivers to run a firewire drive - an interface driver, and 
a storage device driver. This is often a motherboard-maker supplied 
interface driver, and a generic mass storage driver for the drive 
itself. If this is the case, what reason did the manufacturer's engineer 
give for their drive not supporting the generic mass storage driver?

Was the interface driver, or mass storage driver, the implicated software?


> For some reason, that allows for a rare but
> crippling corruption of the drive.

What reason was given?


> I have suffered 4 total corruptions of
> the firewire drives, 

Are these all on the same machine?

Do they involve the same model drive?

Do they involve the same drive manufacturer?

Do they involve the same firewire interface?

Do they involve the same firewire interface model or manufacturer?


> and came to this conclusion after discussion with a
> level-2 engineer 

What does "level-2 engineer" mean? I've never heard the term, and 
frankly it sounds to me like impressive-sounding gobbledygook used to 
describe a tech support person in a call center somewhere.


> from a \ufffdfamous\ufffd drive manufacturer.

Which one?


> It also occurs with USB.

On the same machine as the one that had problems with firewire drives?


 > That [USB] goes through windows drivers as well.

Everything goes through Windows drivers. Did you ask the drive maker if 
you could have one of their drivers, or why their drive didn't support 
Microsoft-supplied drivers?

Are these all on the same machine?

Do they involve the same model drive?

Do they involve the same drive manufacturer?

Do they involve the same firewire interface?

Do they involve the same firewire interface model or manufacturer?


> In my experience, the corruption occurs while writing the disk.

That makes sense, as corruption couldn't possibly happen during reading. 
You could get a read error, even an arbitrarily long string of them in a 
row, but to cause actual corruption, the drive actually has to write 
something to the disk.

So you send your drive in, and they switched platters to an analysis 
mechanism in a clean room and determined the fact of corruption, right?


> This is not a hardware problem
> with external drives; it's a windows software problem.

How do you know?

This is really where my skepticism originates. If it has been 
established as a Windows software problem, I would expect to hear of 
certain tests that were done that established this - not the least 
because they would be either impressive or tedious to you. I'm asking 
about the tests that were done - what were they, and what were the results?


> Using the drive as your main photo storage, without backup is asking for
> disaster in my opinion.

I completely agree. Redundancy is absolutely necessary.

However, unless more, and highly detailed, information is posted, I'm 
afraid I have to conclude your experience is an extremely rare anomaly, 
is of undetermined cause, probably isn't a driver problem (or we'd all 
be experiencing this, since most everyone is using generic mass storage 
drivers), and involves very poor support from the drive manufacturer.

--
Jeff Medkeff
Eagle River, Alaska