Firewire drive for storage: Bottom line?

[rrussell]

I've seen a few posts touching on the use of external firewire drives. They all start out saying "Hey it works GREAT" but then sort of go off on "well, except for this and that" and someone else suggests A, B or C...

You know... like NORMAL threads play out

I'm looking at attaching a firewire-to-IDE enclosure to my Via EPIA M9000 system to (a) free up power and (2) reduce heat inside the case. I don't need to boot from it.

Can anyone suggest a good firewire enclosure? It's going to be sitting near the PVR PC, so it should be quiet and yet good at disbursing heat.

Thanks!
Rob

[rrussell]

OK, well, here's MY experience:

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
NTFS.SYS Address <blah>
STOP: 0x00000050 (blah again)

Not even a "Hey it works GREAT" to kick it off. Oh well.

Has anyone else ever seen this one? Microsoft's support site is surprisingly, well, unsupportive.

[Narflex]

One thing I've noticed is that it's best to NOT connect/disconnect firewire/usb drives while windows is running. It seems to cause various weird problems.

[malore]

I haven't used a firewire drive, but I have used a couple USB drives which should be similar. I have an Iomega 120 GB USB 2.0 drive and a hard drive benchmark indicated it can do 13 MB/s writing and 18.8 MB/s reading. I haven't tried it with SageTV, but I expect it would be fast enough for lower bit rate recordings.

I routinely disconnect my USB drives while Windows is running and haven't experienced any significant problems. I click the Safely Remove Hardware icon that appears in the system tray whenever the drive is active and then turn of the drive. Occasionally it will say the drive is busy, so I shut down the computer before unplugging the drive. But since you plan on using it with SageTV, I expect disconnecting the drive won't be something you plan on doing regularly.

[rrussell]

Malore - true, true. I plan to leave it connected and on 24/7.

I had been having lotsa trouble with the HD that I'd put in the enclosure, so I used Maxtor's utilities to low-level format it. Took 9 hours, but was totally worth it. I'm up and running again, and I have the entire 120GB to work with!

(Rob does a happy dance!!)

[jmeeks]

So what enclosure did you choose?

[rrussell]

I went with the ME-320F as someone else here did.

I'm having more trouble keeping it visible to the system though. This is (as I think I said) on an Epia M9000 board, which allegedly has onboard firewire.

The 1st time I booted, I got the drive.

2nd time, it was gone. I moved the firewire cable to a different port and POOF it showed up again. Huh.

3rd boot, gone again. Took some rebooting and power cycling to get it to show up again. That time I left the thing running.

Trouble is, now that it's disappeared once, Sage Guide has forgotten about the shows I'd recorded on the thing. I had to import them into the video library! Feh!

So I have sent a note to the ppl who make the 320F, and put messages on the via EPIA forums. I'll just have to see what comes of it.

Hate to say it, but at this point I might as well have bought a freakin' TiVo.