currently using native-firewire yamaha 20x burner and pioneer a05 dvdrw (in some oxford911 cheapo enclosure i got for $50) fine, daisy chained. the huge problem is using external hd enclosure.
the problem occurs using different hard drives (i have 3 i've tried, 80gig 7200rpm maxtor bought last year, 120gb seagate cuda just bought, 60gig hitachi/ibm got in rma for deskstar last year) so at this point i suspect the enclosure, but its symptoms have been seen before.
using p4 1.6a, 512mb ddr. using firewire port on sb audigy.
i've tried ads-brand usb2.0 enclosures, ads-brand firewire enclosures, and am currently using a dual usb2/firewire noname enclosure (supposedly with oxford chip) with drive cage.
with the ads ones i used to see delayed write transactions failed randomly in the middle of copying large amounts (hundreds of megs, gigs) across the hds, from firewire to onboard ide. it would also die with this error during cpu-intensive zipping/manipulation of files on that drive. this pissed me off. so i went firewire. and thought my problems went away.
but now i see 'sbp2port timed out' errors in event viewer, and random 'there was an error during paging operation' where i would notice file copies pause suddenly for a unusually long time then resume. is this normal with external firewire??? so reading up, i worry xp has unresolved firewire problems, so i install microsoft's Q329909 issue patch, which doesn't solve it either.
(used to have the drives disappear on me after a restart with a standalone ibm ohci adapter, but it turns out it was an xp problem after all, resolved later by sp1)
so i use the usb 2.0 mode, and it seems okay for a while, except the random pausing and 'an error occured during a file paging operation' show up repeatedly in event viewer again. i even got a 'there is a bad block on device' message in there somewhere. this is on my new 120gb seagate, so i suspect the enclosure at this point.
i've checked the device in device manager (xp sp1) and it's set on caching off in usb2 mode--can't recall what it was in firewire mode. turning it on to optimize for performance as the driver automatically disabling that.
is this normal? is it being transferred far too fast for the external drives to handle? i've tried the hd in firewire mode, as the last device in firewire daisy chain and the other 2 optical drives are not in use at all when i use the drive. what's the point of not being able to do cpu-using stuff on the data on these drives? is my daisy chain order not optimized?
this is driving me insane. sorry if the post is a little nonsensical, i've tried to jam together my thoughts/recollections as best i could. can someone recommend or point me in some direction with external firewire/usb2 storage info? or recommend a good reliable brand/device? or tell me what i'm doing wrong? seems to be an inexact science at best.
my next thing to try, if anything at all, is to take the dvd-rw burner out and try the hd in there...
