Hardrive Mystery?

[RWhite]

It doesn't really matter if you use an internal drive or an external drive, although an external USB2 connection will be slower than an internal SATA or PATA connection. A program like Ghost is going to see them all the same. If your RAID is done via hardware it should see your two-drive RAID as one single drive.

The reason to have the service tag number is that with it, you can go to the Dell web site and see exactly what hardware was shipped with your Dell when you bought it.

 

[benherron.rrr]

FFS!!!!!

Having done a little reading I decided to go and buy an external drive.

Just got my Lacie d2 Quadra 1TB drive today, I am using an eSATA connection.

So I get it all set up and i'm happy. . . . Untill I try copying anything over to it, I drag the folder I want to copy over (quite large) and the drive disconects from the computer, gives me a message telling me that the files can't be copied over because the drive doesn't exist (in short) and then a minute later the drive decides to reconnect to my computer so I try again and the same thing happens.

Whats going on!

 

[RWhite]

One thing to check for about your eSATA issue is a BIOS setting, with most newer Dells it will be called "SATA operation". You want to make sure it is not set to "ATA" or "Legacy". Doing so switches off the "hot swap" capability of SATA drives and can screw up external SATA connections.

BUT... before you change it - if you are running Windows XP, and you are not running SP3 with all the latest updates, changing SATA operation to anything OTHER than "ATA" or "Legacy" might cause your OS to crash on boot-up. So be warned. If you are running Windows 7, there should be no problem.

Or you can avoid all of those issues by simply plugging your drive in via USB 2 rather than eSATA. That's what I ultimately ended up doing with my external drive - I work in a mixed Windows 7 / Windows XP enviroment. You lose some performance, but its much more compatible and portable.

 

[benherron.rrr]

One thing to check for about your eSATA issue is a BIOS setting, with most newer Dells it will be called "SATA operation". You want to make sure it is not set to "ATA" or "Legacy". Doing so switches off the "hot swap" capability of SATA drives and can screw up external SATA connections.

BUT... before you change it - if you are running Windows XP, and you are not running SP3 with all the latest updates, changing SATA operation to anything OTHER than "ATA" or "Legacy" might cause your OS to crash on boot-up. So be warned. If you are running Windows 7, there should be no problem.

Or you can avoid all of those issues by simply plugging your drive in via USB 2 rather than eSATA. That's what I ultimately ended up doing with my external drive - I work in a mixed Windows 7 / Windows XP enviroment. You lose some performance, but its much more compatible and portable.

I looked in the Bios, I had two options for this setting "RAID" and "ATA" so I kept this setting on RAID. I am running Windows 7 by the way.

I need the speed eSATA, to run samples and audio from the drive, USB of FireWire is just too slow. The reason I bought this drive was for the speed of eSATA, If I can't get it working I may aswell return the hard drive.

In one of the Pro Tools guides It told me to change my firewire driver to a (legacy) I don't know if this would hurt anything.

The strange thing is that the drive is visable in 'my computer' the problem is when I drag a sample folder over, after a few seconds of transfer the drive disconnects istself from the computer, I get the noise that happens when you connect something into a USB slot, or take it out. and then it connects itself again, giving me the little options menu.