Digital BW, The Print

Jeff,
I agree with all your points, and with your skepticism.  And yes, it is a
rare occurrence.  There are many possibilities, and I'm no computer
engineer, which I did mention.
My point of posting was to offer my experience, and the corroboration of the
drive manufacturers engineer about the corruption rate of external vs.
internal drives.   The only test I have done after repartitioning and
formatting a corrupted drive is writing 00h, FFh, and a random word to the
entire drive in three passes.  That test completed successfully; and that
drive again became corrupt 2 months later.
What I mean by "level-2" engineer, is the engineer that was assigned my case
after tech-support could not resolve it.  I have not mentioned the brand
name because I have had very good product support from them, and don't
believe "their" drives are defective.  Of course I could be wrong.  Over the
years I have had physical drive failures with various manufacturers, and
this mfg. does not stand out differently in any way.

FWIW, my external drives are plugged directly into an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe
motherboard, which has an onboard Realtek 8801B 1394 PHY.  The drives are a
top brand name, shipped right from the Mfg. in some cases.  The level-2
engineer I spoke with said the number of corrupt drive problems for external
drives greatly outranks the internal ones.  So much so, that it is hurting
their % defective returned product rankings for the line, which for the same
drive mounted internally, is extremely low.  He believes the "windows
drivers" are a major reason for that difference, FWIW. That was all I needed
to hear to adjust my game plan for more peace of mind, which could be in my
mind only I suppose.

Best regards,
John Moody

-----Original Message-----
From: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com]On Behalf Of Jeff
Medkeff
Sent: Monday, July 25, 2005 10:12 AM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Firewire drives (was Re: 2400 vs 2200 using IJC or
QTR)

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 "famous" 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


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