Interesting. I use a MacMini since I am no longer
doing serious pro work and the drives in question were from
OtherWorld Computing. They are Newertechnologies MiniStacks. I
used the first one I bought for about 3 years without problem.
The newer ones have been problematic and I think it is a port
issue. OWC is very good and very fast about exchanges. And they
have rescued and restored all data when the replacement arrives.
That is the good part.
Don
On 10/24/10 6:14 PM, Emily L. Ferguson wrote:
I have three externals. First a Verbatim Firewire 400
320G pocket drive for Time Machine (Apple's built-in automatic
continuous HD backup app). Even with an 80G hard drive it's way
too small. I've had it for 5 months or so and there are only 67G
left.
Second an OtherWorld Computing Firewire 800 2T for my master
files. I bought it a couple months ago and it failed quickly.
They replaced it immediately, with a shipping coupon for me to
return the failed drive when I'd completed the copying. (It would
mount about 20% of the time). The drive itself was not the
problem, but all the ports on the case were intermittent. I've
had the replacement for a month now and all is well.
Finally, over in my storage area I have an old ~150M Firewire 400
drive which had not failed but was too small for my master files.
It is now a bootable backup.
I bought a 500M drive on eBay a couple years ago, Firewire 400.
It served well until it was nearly full and then one day blithely
announced that it was not working any more. After some
experimentation I determined that it would no longer permit me to
write to it, but I could read just fine. I have forgotten which
brand of drive was in it. It was a home brew by some enterprising
unemployed person who opened an eBay store and assembled such
things from parts and sold them.
The quality of the drives in these cases varies wildly, as far as
I can tell. If you read the gossip sheets online (my favorite is
my Mac-L) you will discover that there is no concensus about which
vendor makes the shabbiest drives. However, Mac users generally
have not had good experiences with LaCie drives, or with Iomega
drives.
In addition to using a HD for backup and quick access I also
maintain 2 folders on my desktop - origs and keepers. Everything
is placed in them until they reach DVD capacity and then they are
burned to 2 sets of DVDs One set is kept here (because my
external drive only has my keepers on it and the DVDs have my
original captures on them as well). The other set lives with my
old bootable backup drive off site.
The only origs I discard are those which fail for either artistic
or technical reasons. I may discard identical shots if one is not
level and the other one is, for instance. I will discard anything
that's soft or poorly composed or an unattractive accident.
My last step is to catalog the DVDs with a small app called
CDFinder. This displays all the files, allows me to search by
keywords, filename, foldername, date, etc. etc. and tells me which
DVD I can find the file on.
About 8 months ago I retrieved all my old CDs and DVDs from the
storage area and organized them and reburned them onto DVDs. Many
of the old scans had not been dated, keyworded and captioned. It
was a very tiresome thing to be doing.
Things are in better order now.
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