[Arbernaut]

Hi

Although I back up top DVD fairly regularly, I still have a couple of external hard drives attached to my G5 for MP3s, work and Digital Images. I have four Lacie drives which between them are split into 2 x four partitions:

Disk A
- Work
Disk B
- MP3s
- Images
Disk C
- Work (back-up)
- System (back-up)
Disk D
- MP3s (back-up)
- Images (back-up)

I use SuperDuper to do a smart back-up every night. It won't protect me if the house burns down, but it's better than nothing.

Thinking it might be smart to add a couple of new drives because I'm starting to run out of space, I bought a couple of cheap Maxtor drives from Amazon (a pair of 200GB Maxtor One Touch III drives to be precise) but they have been filling me with anxiety since I added them to my firewire chain.

Every so often the contents disappear; only reappearing with a reboot. Checking the disks with disk utility results in an error: Verify volume failed with error Could not unmount disk and this issue seems to have spread to the other drives (which worked and tested fine previously).

I obviously don't want to lose any information, but I'm unsure what's at fault: The system? The new disks? What should I be doing here: advice and suggestions please!

[Macola]

Are these FireWire disks? If so, are they daisy-chained? In that case, you may get better results with a FireWire hub.

I tend to avoid Maxtor drives anyway, after having a couple of bad problems with them in the past.

[Arbernaut]

They are daisy chained. Will look into a hub...

[ender78]

The only finicky behaviour I have seen with external drives was due to poorly supported firewire controllers in some enclosures. OS X really likes an Oxford 911/912 chipset on the enclosure's firewire controller. I have a new temporary enclosure that is USB only and I have no problems mounting any of the partitions.

Make sure that you get a powered hub if possible.

[mduell]

While I understand the appeal of buying relatively cheap disks (although your latest purchase seems a bit small to hit the capacity/price optimum), have you considered consolidating to fewer drives? How much data do you currently have, and how fast is it growing?