* * * UPDATE * * *
I have taken Elliot’s advice on this one and bought the following:
1.5TB (1500GB) OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro High Performance 7200RPM FireWire 400+USB2 Solution with 32MB Data Buffer and featuring the Oxford 934 Chipset. FW400 & USB2 Cables, Prosoft Data Backup, Intech HD SpeedTools, and 3 Year OWC Solution Warranty.
If all goes well, I will pick up one more in a few months, and hopefully that will keep me for a few years. I’m also curious about the backup software they include because I’ve never thought much of EMC retrospect. I can go into the various things I don’t like about it, but there’s been enough complaining in this post to last for a while. I can only say that at least on paper (screen) these look like good products. If it blows up then maybe there are ghosts in the house.
There were just too many conflicting reports on Seagate drives.
Whoever said that delayed write was drive specific – was right. Drives have been copying from one WD drive to the other for two days and nights without any issues. (Still going… but this should be done in a few hours and then all files are backed up. Will be doing reorganization once the new drive arrives. My own conclusion about the external drives (not the ones in good enclosures) is that they simply aren’t cooled properly compared to the drives in the machines.
* * * END OF UPDATE * * *
My LaCie 1TB drive just blinks now. After a day of trying to format / partition etc. and changing cables and getting tons of Delayed Write Errors, it went to the dark side. I read a bunch of stuff saying that it may only be the power supply which has been known to fail.
I was using it as my online backup drive, so now I’m in the process of recreating backups of all my files, i.e. copying the live stuff to another external drive.
Over the last few years, I’ve used LaCie (dead), Maxtor Externals, and Western Digital MyBooks. All have failed at one point or another, usually around the one year point. I’d say that the WD drives have held up the best (knock wood), but not by much. It’s just that the ones that haven’t failed have kept going the longest
Ah the beauty of technology. I suppose I’ll try and get a new power supply and see if that makes the difference, but if it isn’t that — I’m out some dough. It seems that they like to check out just as the warranty period is over.
I’ve never really had the extra cash to buy a proper solution. Don’t really care if they are hot swappable; but it would be great if they’d last more than a year. I’ve read tons of people with external drives that have lived for many years without a hitch, but I don’t seem to be lucky in that department. I’ve got about 50,000 files being copied as we talk. I also have the stuff on DVDs, but what a pain that would be if I had to go to them to do a drastic restore.
Maybe I should look at that other solution that’s been out there for a while — I forget the name — dumbro or something like that. But I suppose what I’d like the best would be an array of raid drives in a unit with a super big fan. This is one area where I really am not an expert and have been getting by by the skin of my teeth.
One thing I am going to do for sure – is do a lightroom catalog of all my sellable prints (gathered from many LR catalogs) and make sure that is properly backed up. That should be easy enough since let’s face it, I only have about 275 prints – total – that are in the store, and I don’t keep them at various sizes anymore. Just the original with it’s LR manipulations; and some super big ones that I used ProZoom to create (uhm extrapolate). It was a wasted day though — what with trying to figure out whether it was the drive, the cable, some sort of BIOS thing; etc. The last thing I did, while it was still visible was to partition the 1TB drive into three volumes, since I read somewhere that really large files could cause paging problems.
Yes, I played around with just about everything that could be effecting it (re-installing stuff; uninstalling stuff;) you know the drill, until I came across the forum where a bunch of people all talked about the blinking light and how they were saved by using a new power supply.
Well, in the meantime – I sent emails to my dad and his girlfriend to see if they’d buy some stuff from the Zazzle store. I don’t think my father has ever bought a product or print from me – he expect them for free. Which is fair since when I’ve run into financial crunches, he’s helped me out. But I love the idea of having him sip his tea from one of my cups. I am really curious to see if he can figure out how to do the order on Zazzle (along with his wife). They said they were going to give them as gifts – and so the word spreads.
Busy times. Orders came back when the mats were put back in the dropdown box; and I’ve been selling at least one item a day through Zazzle, as well as picking up a fair amount of pocket change with their referrals; i.e. someone goes in from my site, and goes somewhere else and buys something and I get 15% of the sale. A very good incentive for me to keep working.
The mugs have all turned out well. But my sister ordered a shirt for her daughter – dark material – and it seems to have melted in the dryer. She was just going to ignore it, but I talked her into writing back to Zazzle to complain about the melted shirt and they are going to send a replacement. The real question is how this stuff holds up in the heat of the dryer.
It’s not an issue with light fabric. But the technology that Zazzle uses for dark fabrics is completely different. You know what, I’ll do my own tests (force me to do my laundry) and if this does turn out to be a problem, I’ll be stuck with either printing on light fabric (no ink is put down where the image is white) or doing the dark fabric but with a warning not to stick it in the dryer; or – just remove the shirts altogether. Other than the ones I’ve bought for testing, I don’t believe I’ve sold any shirts yet.
Oh -just to keep me on my toes – the photo lessons continue. I have another two lined up. So my idea (figured out last year) of trying to have three separate streams of income – well – hard to believe but it’s working. And wonder of wonder – the FEDEX TUBES (triangles really) are excellent for large prints (and they’re free) and so I don’t need to clutter the house with the big Kraft tubes I had been buying from uLine. Since the tubes come flat, I can slice them in half and have a sort of telescopic triangle tube for the smaller unmatted prints, which actually works well since it doubles the layer of FEDEX cardboard (which is the strongest cardboard I’ve ever run across)…. so the story continues…
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the delayed write errors are not a system wide thing – but were just related to that one freakin’ LaCie drive. So far, that seems to be the case.
(Now – how’s that for an all over the place post. I think that’s what my writing trademark: start with one subject and take a grand tour of everything that’s on my mind. In the best posts, they come back to the topic sentence. But not here.)
Happy end of first day of the new year.