fldrummer said:
My firewire drives are almost as fast as my internal drives.
Same here....... I've got several of the Maxtor OneTouch 200gig drives -- they're excellent... I've even done video rendering off of one and I don't see a difference between it and the internal drives......
Farview said:
I bought a USB hard drive and the transfer speed is really slow. I can burn DVD's faster than this.
Jason, you'll want to be adding/upgrading to USB 2 -- makes all the difference. Under USB 2 the transfer rates are slightly faster than Firewire......
Only downside to these Maxtor OneTouch drives -- they don't work well thru a network connection -- too many Windows "paging" errors to be usable. They work best mounted to a specific machine directly. I discovered this the hard way... had a couple mounted to my server, and I was copying stuff from the studio computer to it and I got a file I/O error - when I went over to the server, Windows reported that a paging error occurred and that the drive was corrupt, which scared the crap out of me... I dismissed the error and recycled the drive - sure enough, Windows wouldn't see it. Figured I'd try a reboot for fun, and the drive came up no problem (and no data was lost)... I tried the transfer again, and came up with the same issue -- it was a large file, to be sure. Same procedure, same error, but nothing was lost when the drive came up after a reboot. (Nothing was lost, but of course the file I was trying to copy didn't get copied!)
Anyways, I check the Maxtor site to see if there was any info - new drivers - whatever... no new drivers (these were new units) - but of course they talk about these exact "paging" errors right in the FAQ... no solution other than saying - these drives are not designed to be used for I/O of very large files across networks....
But I have been using these units directly attached to my computers over a year now without ever seeing these errors.