USB Hard Drive; recording to and playing from

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack
  • Start date Start date
J

Jack

Has anyone tried recording movies to and playing from
a USB 2 external hard drive? If so, with what results?

Thanks,
Jack.
 
My poor external USB and firewire hard disks suffered from either too much
file system traffic (a USB problem or a NTFS problem or both) or maybe ATI
card interference. They would crash.

Now I copy a movie file back to an internal drive and play it there.

My new large 300GB Seagate USB/Firewire drives actually come in FAT32 format
because, the startup guide says, it's more stable.
I reformatted them to NTFS anyway, but treat them nicely, don't run more
than one file transfer activity at a time, don't try to run movies from the
externals, and disabled last access time setting from them:

from
http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/02/08/NTFS_Hacks.html
"8. Disable Last Access Time
By default, each file and folder on an NTFS volume has an attribute called
Last Access Time, which records the last time the file or folder was opened,
read, or changed. This means even when you read a file on an NTFS volume, a
write action occurs on that volume too. Normally this isn't a problem, but
if you have an application that tends to frequently access files for short
periods of time, this feature of NTFS can really slow performance.
Fortunately, you can use fsutil to disable writing to the Last Access Time
attribute:
fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
Once this is done, the Last Access Time attribute for newly created files
will simply be their File Creation Time.
One caveat: disabling Last Access Time may affect the operation of backup
programs that use the Remote Storage service. "

I haven't had any trouble in three weeks!
follow San Francisco's favorite team at http://sfangels.com
 
Thank you for the info. It was what I suspected would happen but didn't
want
to spend money proving it. The info you attached at the end of your message
also explains, at least in part, the lack of reliability when storing
files on an NTFS
drive or partition. Too bad that very large HDs can only be formatted
in NTFS.

Jack.
 
"Too bad that very large HDs can only be formatted in NTFS" is false.

eg, http://www.epinions.com/content_169167064708 (first search item i
found on google, i can't find my seagate guide right now)
"The drive comes formatted from the factory with Fat32 file system, and in
my case I left it this way as I want to be able to access the data through
my Linux partition as well."
 
Hi, Jack.
Too bad that very large HDs can only be formatted in NTFS.
Click to expand...

That's a common misconception. Microsoft - probably to encourage us all to
abandon FAT and migrate to NTFS as soon as possible - made Win2K and WinXP
unable to format volumes larger than 32 GB as FAT32. But Win2K/XP have
always been able to USE much larger FAT32 volumes formatted by other
operating systems. And even Win98 has always been able to format volumes as
large as ~128 GB as FAT32. I don't know about Linux or other operating
systems that the drive maker may be using at the factory.

See this page in the online version of the WinXP Pro Resource Kit:
Size Limitations in NTFS and FAT File Systems
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_tdrn.asp

Also note that the limitations are per VOLUME (primary partition or logical
disk in an extended partition) and that there can be several volumes on a
single HD, so the limit per physical drive is several multiples of these
sizes.

I'm no expert on file systems, so I can't address the comments about
disabling Last Access Time or anything like that, although it's the first
time that I've heard NTFS' reliability questioned. I just wanted to correct
the oft-stated error that FAT32 can't be used on large volumes.

RC
 
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