USB Hard Drive GOTCHA !! :(

[garyb]

my theory is that tends to happen when the drive gets disconnected during a write. being usb, a disconnection is always a possibility(that's the reason for "safely remove" or "eject"). i am always nervous writing to usb. it usually is reliable, but not 100% of the time. i've lost data this way when moving it. i've learned to copy and delete after instead of moving files. i also almost always work from a internal hdd and use usb drives only for backup.

[jksuperstar]

+1 copy then delete.

[Nestor]

my theory is that tends to happen when the drive gets disconnected during a write. being usb, a disconnection is always a possibility(that's the reason for "safely remove" or "eject"). i am always nervous writing to usb. it usually is reliable, but not 100% of the time. i've lost data this way when moving it. i've learned to copy and delete after instead of moving files. i also almost always work from a internal hdd and use usb drives only for backup.

Same to say here, I do exactly the same myself. USB drives are great, if you use them with some precaution. One of the ways to avoid problems it is not to plug and unplug them, but rather to start and switch off the PC with them. I have avoided some problems this way. I don't know if this will suit everyone though.

[valis]

If you go into the little usb icon in your tasktray and 'safely remove' the device it will force windows to flush any unwritten data to the device, and then give you the 'this device can be safely removed' message when done.

Alternatively you can disable write caching to any external devices, but this will reduce performance. When this is done any file operations that are visible in explorer (progress bars) become 'real' instead of 'virtual' and actually show the progress for the operation in question.

I use Firewire drives (and evenutally thunderbolt I'm sure) for data critical operations and USB devices when convenience is more of a factor. On modern chipsets the performance between the two is actually comparable (Intel has done a great job integrating USB into its chipsets and providing low cpu load for USB transfers to boot) and I tend to toss out cheap USB cables that come with devices sticking with the higher quality and especially shielded ones that I've gathered.

[jksuperstar]

My laptop has an eSata/usb combo port, which makes the perfect external drive scenario. esata doesn't have power, but usb does provide enough for smaller or low power drives. So if anyone goes that route, make sure you get a combo cable, and ext drive case that can take power via usb. A combo esata/usb enclosure means I can get hi performance on my laptpp, but still bring the drive along for use anywhere.

[garyb]

i'm probably foolish, but i only trust esata for mission critical data streams, but i'm gritting my teeth. firewire is something i trust as far as the connector is wide. i will say this though, i trust the firewire connector a little more than the usb one. i've seen both break and get miss aligned and short out.

before someone thinks i'm trying to be high and mighty, i use all three plenty...

[Bud Weiser]

my theory is that tends to happen when the drive gets disconnected during a write. being usb, a disconnection is always a possibility(that's the reason for "safely remove" or "eject"). i am always nervous writing to usb. it usually is reliable, but not 100% of the time. i've lost data this way when moving it. i've learned to copy and delete after instead of moving files. i also almost always work from a internal hdd and use usb drives only for backup.

Confirmed !
I lost 3 harddrives,- all USB2, by moving files,- even very small ones.
It once happened moving a 16kb preset file for NI Pro53 years ago.

There´s always the option disconnecting the ext. USB drive savely by using the systray icon, but it doesn´t work always here.
Occasionally I get a message "drive cannot be removed because it´s actually used by another program or application",- even there´s no program or application open/running.
I never found out which program, app or service running in background might cause this.
Mostly I use Total Commander for copying/moving files and if done, I close the program.

There are situations, you are in a hurry and cannot wait lots of minutes or sometimes hrs to savely disconnect that drive,- so the crash happens when doing a hot unplug.

Firewire isn´t much more reliable though.
I actually lost a FiWi powered IOMEGA120GB drive connected to a Mac Powerbook G4 Titanium DVI 800 by no reason.
I assume FiWi controller failure because I see the drive´s partition over USB,- externaly powered and on a PC.
Officially hot-plugging FiWi is no prob, but I think that´s really true.

B.t.w., I recovered all my crashed USB harddrives w/ Partition Table Doctor and was able to copy all the data over to another USB drive.
I put the crashed USB drives out of their enclosures and used a IDE/SATA>USB adapter which worked perfect.

eSATA being the best ...

Well, I have onboard eSATA w/ my ASUS P5WD2 Deluxe mobo, which is the machine I use for XITE-1,- but the eSATA is unbelievable slow.
It´s a Silicon Image SiL controller.
I use a ext. eSATA case and Samsung 1TB HD, but don´t use any RAID features, so I don´t know how to upgrade the driver or speed up the connection otherwise.
The driver pack I downloaded some time ago is extremely confusing in regards on WinXP and which files to use for a update not related on RAID.
Cannot remember if I downloaded from ASUS or SiL website,- maybe both.

Any idea ?

Bud

[valis]

WinXP's not ideal for ESATA, as it's really a feature that needs AHCI (for hot pluggin) and AHCI is 'bolted on' to WinXP after the fact.

Firewire has the advantage of having the most robust protocol, it was designed to be used in all sorts of commercial enterprises and IS used in commercial and military aircraft and ships among other things. It's disliked in the commodity PC market because of the licensing fees that came with it, but it was rarely mentioned that the licensing fee is meager compared to some of the applications it sees (imagine balking over a licensing fee for an onboard avionics package in a jet fighter where it adds %0.0001 to the total cost...)

And when you try to eject and are given the message that a drive is still 'in use' by some application, the most likely culprit is windows itself. Disable write caching if speed of ejecting is more important than speed of writes, if you have your DAW app open and try to write and eject on the fly to get out the door, the reason the files weren't written is that Windows decides there are other higher priority tasks (your DAW app, Scope etc) eating up cpu time and will continue to defer updating the file allocation table (FAT/Fat32/ExFat) or MFT (NTFS) until it's decided the system is idle. Usually the data is actually *there* just not pointed to yet, and force ejecting obviously corrupts the file system as the file system wasn't ever updated! Unfortunately this scenario can happen regardless of what external connection scheme you use...USB, Firewire or ESATA.

[garyb]

correct.

[Bud Weiser]

WinXP's not ideal for ESATA, as it's really a feature that needs AHCI (for hot pluggin) and AHCI is 'bolted on' to WinXP after the fact..........

Unfortunately this scenario can happen regardless of what external connection scheme you use...USB, Firewire or ESATA.

Thx for the detailed info, interesting read and clears up a lot !

Bud

[spacef]

I don't know if it is of interest to the poster, but I just got hold of an enermax USB 3 case (to plug on my ASUS U3S6 Usb3/sata6 expansion card . In fact, I find it so good so far, that I bought another one a few days later (i am moving a few hard drive out of the computer).
http://www.enermax.fr/fr/brick-eb308s-b ... 4-2-c.html

Those disk case need a power supply, but I was surpised to see the hard drive going Off when I switched the computer off.... And when I turned the computer On again, then the disk turned itself On.
But it is not self powered because you still need to have the electric supply plugged in to have those functions, which are cool because you don't need to switch the disk off when you switch off the studio. (May be it's a feature of usb 3?).

I am constantly above 50 MB/s write speed on those disk (caviar black 500 GB inside). That's about 10 / 15 MB/s less than my e-sata external drive, which contains a samsung 1TB (F3 if i remember well, the fastest mechanical drive I ever tested, as it can read at a constant 120 MBps according to my tests, and it writes at 70 MB/s). But the samsung have always been much faster than any of my caviar black or blue, may be the disk size counts too (1 TB is obviously faster no ?) , so I am not sure is comparable + I am moving various types of files, can be very small (samples, docs) or very large (videos, disk images...) according to the disk, so that counts too, because many smaller files take longer to write.

Anyway, I hope it helps