I've been using a firewire external drive for some time, and have had nothing but problems.
I have a 500MHz tibook that has been running various versions of 10.x and I bought a Maxtor 5000DV in April of 2003. All during 2003 I had intermittant drive errors that were generally repairable by Disk Utility. They were unrepeatable, and a seemingly random amount of time goes between issues. I eventually called Maxtor and got an RMA; after receiving a brand new onw late in 2003, it did the same thing after some time (lost to memory). Over the course of the year, I think I had to start from scratch and reformat 3-4 times, since neither Disk Utility or DiskWarrior could fix. During the same period of time, I probably had to repair the drive 20 times. In most cases, the drive would repair with no loss of data.
By around June 2004 timeframe I had come to the conclusion that the Maxtor controller was at fault, and bought an ADS FW enclosure (FW400 = USB2.0) and moved the Maxtor drive over. Seemingly, my problems were over until recently. All was well, never needed repairing, and on a "verify" in DU no problems would show up. In December, I had what looked like a HW failure on the drive, copies took a long time, some files did not load, etc. I ran DU, could not do anything (underlying task reported an error or something like that). I ran DW, same kind of result. The drive stopped mounting pretty quickly and all seemed to be lost. I checked out the demo of Prosoft's DataRescue and it was able to scan the drive but in the process the console reports a bazillion "I/O error" messages. After determining that my only choice was to reformat (the first time with this enclosure); DU would not reformat or repartition the drive. So, today I moved the drive back into the Maxtor enclosure for grins (actually, trying to determine if hte controller or the drive had failed). The drive formatted fine with DU, and I was able to copy plenty of files, etc. over. All looked great! So, again for grins, I moved the drive back into the ADS enclosure; it worked fine. Allowed me to read and write, the files I had just put on the drive were still there, I was able to reformat again and drop several gigs over to it. In short, it looks like nothing is wrong :-(
So, I have no idea what the problem is, or what is causing it, or what to trust. The cables are solid ones that came with the enclosures. My general practice is to put the tibook to sleep and leave the FW case on; the drive is put into sleep mode. The Maxtor drive doesn't even have a power switch, so this makes sense to me anyway. For all these months, this has been fine; when the book is reawakened, the drive is still mounted and works like a champ.
I do not believe I have ever installed an OS update with the drive mounted, but I can't guarantee that. Certainly, the last failure mode was not because of an OS install. I'm on 10.3.6 right now.
What is going on here? Does anyone else have this kind of experience? Any recommendations as to what to do? I'm at my wit's end!
Top
