Firewire Storage,cards,dvd burners , are you using firewire?

[DVDCake]

Hey all!

OK, who is using firewire on a PC? Anyone having issues with transfering groups of files larger than 4GB? Please post your experiences with firewire, good and bad.

Thnaks

[stl]

I've got a maxtor 80GB 1394 HD. I run win98SE and have it set up with 2 hardware profiles. I have intermittent read/write problems. sometimes a reboot works, sometimes not. In particular, it freezes up for a while and at times windows tells me that the drive is inaccessible. Recently, I tried importing clips into premiere 6 which took very long and when I tried to preview it froze totally.

I want to upgrade to win2k, does anyone think this will help and I would also like to know if it is something with FAT32 that does'nt let me copy or move captured AVI clips.

[Mac Sidewinder]

I use firewire with my DV videocamera. No problems with it at all. I can't comment on the >4gb problem since I am using winme and that the fat32 file limit.

Mac

[DVDCake]

Thanks for the reply's. I'm using XP so there should be no limit to the size of files that are stored. I'm actually only moving groups of files that total or excede 4GB.

[stl]

guys, I was on maxtor's site and they claim that these are confirmed MS issues and to download the 1394 supplement. I did that when I bought the drive and that was to get it installed so their advice is bunk. However, it also said to select "allow non-compliant device" or something like that in device manager under the 1394 controller properties. That seems to have resolved the "drive unavailable" issues, so if you haven't done so, try it out.

Secondly, I've used mediastudio pro6 with this settup and never had problems. Recently, I tried premiere6 and it would take 5-10 min to import a 4GB AVI clip and would freeze totally on playback. People on Adobe's forum said to defrag the drive, but that only helped a little.

there is also on their forum a "maxtor 1394 problems" so others have had issues like these too.

If anyone had similar problems with premeire please reply.

[jeremymacmull]

Ive got 3 Firewire Devices all daisy chained onto one port which i have.

I have an 80 gb ibm 120gxp 7200 hdd in a firewire box
A 30 Gb Maxtor 5400 in a firewire box
And a 12X CDRW

Ive transferred more than 4 GB files to and from all drives including my internal 48 gb drive and ive never had any probs

On the other hand if my Comp is very busy it sometimes takes a few seconds longer to load up avis during this time it looks like the comp has frozen as the mouse no longer works etc , but this lasts about 3 secs max and then all is normal

EZEKIEL

[TRILIGHT]

Strange problems y'all are having. I have the Maxtor 160GB firewire drive. I use it with the Maxtor branded firewire card (It's a Lucent chipset) on the PC and with an Adaptec PCMCIA Firewire card in the laptop. I run Windows XP and have not had any issues with the drive or the cards. In fact, the video capturing I do is to this drive and, even though it's only a 5400RPM drive, I've never had a dropped frame using my Pinnacle DVD1000 card and Adobe Premiere.

[DVDCake]

Try this you guys

Grab 5 gigs of data on your firewire drive, anything, it doesnt have to be one 5 gig file, It can be multiple files. Then copy it to your local IDE drive. See what happens.

[TRILIGHT]

hmm... I'll do it when I get a chance. I'm encoding on that system/drive right now and it won't be done for another 4 hours. As for large chunks of data, I don't think I've copied that much information off of the drive, but I've copied well more than that to the drive. I recently moved my MP3 collection off of the drive in one of my PC's to the Maxtor drive so it would be portable. That was just over 12GB of data and there were no problems.

[DVDCake]

There is no problem moving data from one firewire drive to the other, as long as you stay on devices that are on the same firewire chain you are ok. But once you try to move more tham 4gb off of that chain is where you are in trouble. Moving and copying are different than writing. My feeling is that the firewire device is trying to move the data to fast for the IDE bus and the cache on the firewire card fills up then disconnects the device.

Pat

[TRILIGHT]

Ok, I tested my copying a video_ts folder with VOB files in it. The total data size was 7.12GB. I copied this data to 3 different types of drives from my Maxtor 5400RPM 160GB drive with the following results:

1. To Quantum 10k RPM Ultra160 SCSI - Transfer time: less than 10 minutes.

2. To Western Digital 7200RPM IDE - Transfer time: ~13-14 minutes

3. To IBM Travelstar drive on laptop via Adaptec firewire card - Transfer time: ~20 minutes.

At no time did either system lock up, require a reboot, disconnect the drive, or anything strange at all. I suspect your problem is with your particular card, or even the way your system board itself is allocating resources on the PCI bus. It's definitely something in your particular configuration though, be it bad hardware or bad setup.

Just FYI, I am running Windows XP on both systems and all drives were running NTFS. I don't trust the Win9x code or FAT-anything as far as I can throw them! There both worthless trash IMHO. I haven't used either since NT4 was released in 1996.