LaCie external hard-drives

[rico]

My 250gb D2 Extreme Hard-drive seems to be playing "lets turn myself off" today... although hasn't effected any uploads or work its a tad disconcerting.

any ideas fellow pistonheaders?

Last time it turned off my phone was ringing next to it... could that have an effect? It's firewire connected.

[GreenV8S]

Do you have the option of using USB? I find my Maxtor 250GB external drive is reliable over USB but slightly flakey over firewire. Can't see why this would make it turn off though, on mine the firewire problems showed up as occasional write failures.

[rico]

I do indeed have the option of USB, however i bought it to aid in editing up videos that i make as a hobby. Therefore having the fastest connection possible is a real benefit to me.

Thanks for the suggestion though. If it starts annoying me i'll go over to USB

[steve-p]

My 250GB external Maxtor drive is 100% reliable with Firewire. It's been powered on 24/7 for months and is used for scheduled backups every night. I do not see that there can be a fundamental problem with the technology. Buggy drivers or a poor implementation on the host end perhaps might cause problems. USB2 is faster according to the published speed but in practice it's slower because USB2 is bursty and Firewire has a higher sustained transfer rate.

[greenv8s]

My Firewire adapter is a plug-in PCMCIA card so it may not be as reliable/compatible as one that was built in to the PC. I don't know, I'm just guessing this was what caused the drive to be unreliable.