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Firewire harddrive speeds
Good morning all,
A few months ago I had a problem with firewire harddisk speeds. I though updates of Windows XP or other programs would solve the problem: how wrong could I be . So what's the problem? Well, I have owned several external firewire harddrives to store all the media I collected troughout the years (pictures from by photo camera, movies from my digital video camera and all kinds of goodies downloaded from the Net). Normally the harddrive speed doesn't give any problem. The problem starts in certain circumstances. Let me explain a few: (1) Burning files or images on cd's directly from the firewire harddrive This is virtually impossible. You can see the "buffer" or "cache" of the burning software "fill up" perfectly in the beginning of the burning session. But after a few minutes this buffer is not filled up fast enough from the firewire harddrive. Although the drive should be more then fast enough for this, it somehow doesn't send the information to the burning program quick enough. Burning a cd this way will take forever because the burning has to pause everytime until the buffer has slowly filled up again. I used different kinds of burning programs, and all have the same problem. (2) Watching "virtual DVD's" via a virtual cd/dvd program Also this is not possible. I store all my cd's and some dvd's on my firewire drive, so I don't have to carry them around when I travel (I do that a lot). At this moment I use VirtualCD 6.0 as virtual cd program, but have used others also (all have the same problem). When I want to watch a movie from a virtual DVD it will pause many times. This is very annoying when watching a movie. I also used many different programs to view the DVD's. The one I am using now is WinDVD. But all of them have the same problem. (3) Sometimes the firewire drive cannot be seen Every now and then the firewire drive doesn't appear when starting up my computer. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does it is very annoying. Normally disconnecting and connecting the harddrive again will solve the problem. Also the harddrive dissapears sometimes when I connect another hardrive to it (daisy chain). The drive that is connected will be recognized by Windows and appears on the computer, but the firewire drive that was already connected will disappear, while it is still connected. So it does seem like the firewire drive is the cause of all these problems. It somehow cannot "keep up" if some programs are used. This is strange, because firewire drives should be quick enough for these tasks. I tried the following to solve the problem, but none of them had any success: (1) Tried to speed up the drive by enabling writing cache in the hardware settings of the firewire drive. (2) Updated all drivers, software and Windows XP to the most recent versions. Using Windows XP SP2 now. (3) Tried all kind of different kinds of software to do the job (several different burning programs and DVD players). (4) Tried 3 different brands of firewire harddrives (LaCie, Miglia and Maxtor) on many different kind of computers (notebooks, desktops). Had the same problem everywhere. Note that all computers were running Windows XP. Because I only get the problem with programs which use some kind of buffers or caches themselves, I was thinking if the problem was maybe lying there. Is that right? Should I disable buffers or caches in the programs to speed up the drive? Am I the only one with this problem? I have never seen any message from anybody with the same problem. Do the same problems occcur with external harddrives on USB 2 connections? I was planning to put the drives in USB 2 casings. Or maybe even Firewire 800 casings. But I want to know if the same problem will occur. It would be very nice if you could help me, because I'm getting quite desperate here . Regards, Erwin |
#2
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Good afternoon again,
Oh well, just a reply to myself then . I bought a new casing for my external drive. It is now connected via USB2, and .... tadaaaa ... movies on virtual DVD's play smoothly and burning programs and ISO's directly from the external drive to a CD goes without any delay. I know that firewire is capable of 400Mb/s transfers and USB2 of 480Mb/s, but I am not convinced that the 80Mb/s made the difference. And of course I'm still curious if others have the same speed problems with external firewire harddrives and how they may have solved the problem. Kind regards, Erwin |
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