Gericom 250Gb External Hard Drive At Aldi [CLOSED]

martint123

From Belkins site:-

The original USB specification allowed a maximum of 127 devices to share a single port at speeds up to 12 megabits per second (Mbps).

Apple's IEEE-1394 (FireWire) specification moved into PC territory, offering the advantages of USB with speed (up to 400 Mbps).

USB 2.0 offers a maximum transfer rate of up to 480 Mbps.

shrek101

Just read a liitle up on firewire compared with usb2. usb2 is slightly quicker in burst mode, that being for quick copying etc. However for sustainability firewire is quicker for transferring large amount of data. Firewire comes in two standards, 400 which is the slower rate and firewire 800. I am not sure if the Lacia and or the firewire port I have on pc is 800.

Some more info here

http://www.choice.com.au/viewarticleasonepage.aspx?id=104527&catId=100274&tid=100008&p=1

Odd_Fellow

I bought a bargain Lacie 250 external hard drive from https://www.savastore.com last year for around £100.

It's a firewire drive and I had a Firewire card in my laptop so it was a great buy. That was until it stared screwing up and loosing data, corrupting. etc.

It's not a LACIE problem, it's a firewire / windows problem and it's well documented on the internet. There are a lot of people that suffer from this and, to be honest, you're buying an external device to store your data and you bloody well expect it to do it. I relied on this and copied lots of data to it that I've now lost.

So, if you have Windows 2000 or XP and are thinking of a Firewire drive, think VERY CAREFULLY before you spend your money.

The issue tends to centre around a Delayed Write Failure error. Type in Delayed Write Failure Firewire into Google to get some information. The best resource seems to be: http://www.bustrace.com/products/delayedwrite.htm

I have also seen suggestions that it may happen with USB drives also.

BeelzebubUK

I've been running a 250GB external case on Firewire for about a year now and had no problems with it. You've got me worried now as I always back everything up to it when I do a format :eek:

Running from a Shuttle SB75G2 on one of the built-in Firewire ports.

lipidicman

BeelzebubUK, you should do an MD5 checksum before you backup, then do the backup - then check the md5 file against the backups

The MD5 file is a 'signature' that can be verified to check file corruption (like the CRC used in zip archives) it looks like a random string of letters and numbers for each file. I always make one to verify every CD I make. These things have saved me a lot of grief over the years

Odd_Fellow

BeelzebubUK wrote:

I've been running a 250GB external case on Firewire for about a year now and had no problems with it. You've got me worried now as I always back everything up to it when I do a format :eek:

Running from a Shuttle SB75G2 on one of the built-in Firewire ports.

You've a right to be worried. I had no idea about these problems until I lost 10Gb of images many of which are irreplacable being either my children or images relating to my business.

Fact is that it dosen't seem to affect everyone and that there seem to be issues with certain Firewire Bridge interface systems and Windows. My Lacie drive is a virtual peice of junk now. It's totally untrustworthy in my environment but I've yet to try it on my Mac. However, that obscures the point, I wanted a PC hard drive that was fast to store images that are on average 5mb each and get them recalled as thumbnails very quickly (on my laptop). Having to work across a network to a Mac defeats the object.

I have updated the Firmware on the drive using a download from Lacie and that appeared to improve things, but one morning I got to the computer and I had another series of Delayed Write Failures. The problem is that I don't seem to be able to force the failures and so I can't trust the device to store any valuable data as it might, in 6 months time, be lost again.

My advice to ANYONE thinking of buying an external drive for a windows XP or 2000 machine is to avoid potential problems by NOT BUYING a firewire drive.

charlie12

I've got a Firewire enclosure with an Oxford 911 chipset, and it works flawlessly.

The reliability is reliant upon the chipset, AFAIK Oxford ones are the best, and Prolific ones seem to cause the most problems.

A quick Google search will bring up loads of info.

mike_the_bike_2

Blimey you folks have now got me totally confused what to do, although I appreciate your comments..

I've got a Sony Laptop that is 3 years old and has USB 1 and firewire connectors...I'm not technical but can you get a PC card thingy to put a USB2 connector into it..

Experts what external drive should I buy???????????????????????

lipidicman

Well the firewire problems sound bad - but the reports that it happens with USB2 as well has really put me off. Im going to go the big PATA drive with a new PCI-ATA card route in my aging PII.

With win2k does anyone know if the 137Gb limit is 'per partition, or 'per drive'

shrek101

I got mine today, the Aldi one. It looks very good build, has seperate power supply, 2 usb ports at front and two car reader slots. At the back there is a on/off power switch. Just plugged it into pc usb 2 and plug power supply and bombs you way. Its already formatted for fat32, prefer NTFS. Seems pretty fast, quite surprised.