Drive went south, now wha -- help!

mark raudonis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've gotta defend Derek here. I think his opinion
> of LaCie drives is accurate.
>
> Three years ago we bought a whole fleet of
> LaCie's: 1 Tb, 250's, 500's. At least a dozen
> drives.
>
> mark

Personally I never try to buy drives "in bulk" like that 'cause if a bad batch of drives came out of the factory (or a bad batch of enclosures) yer sunk. People used to think IBM drives (now Hitachi) were bullet proof until a bad batch of Deskstar drives hit the market a few years ago. The failure rate was so high they became known as Deathstar drives. Western Digital used to be the bottom of the barrel drive but that's not true these days. Each company has ups and downs.

Years ago I had two 20 (or 40) gig Maxtors go bad w/in a couple of months of each other. But the larger Maxtors I purchased at the same time (as well as the replacement drives) never went bad to this day. I'd just purchased 2 drives from the same bad batch that came out of the factory. Currently I have Maxtor, Seagate, and WD drives used in a variety of roles (so back-up, some editing) both internal and external (some MyBooks, some LaCie, some in 1st party enclosures) and no major problems to report. The MyBooks and LaCie drives seem to run hot so they are in back-up roles where they are kept unplugged most of the time.

-A

Derek writes-

[I don't know why you feel offended by my negative reviews of those drives, Loren...if you had a good experience, say so.]

Obviously, I did!

I'm not offended, Derek, I'm pointing out that your "review" was a sweeping generality and dictum about LaCie's which does not hold water everywhere-- and that goes for other who've chimed in. You folks may be using them in a rough and tough way which I don't. I don't hot plug them to dismount them, for instance, unless I've dragged them to trash first. I use them fairly carefully, and I've described how, and that includes clean power-- which has been the cause of more drive corruption than I care to recollect, on Avid or FCP. The minute these units plug into an UPS with Automatic Voltage Regulatiion, many problems disappear.

On FCP, using DV25 and nothing more, these LaCie's have held up just fine. That's my report, to balance yours. Nothing more.

Andy writes-
[LaCie -only experience has been with their small firewire powered pocket drives -- all have been rock solid for on the road editing]

Back to power issues. You're very lucky. In general, you shouldn't use bus-powered FireWire drives by ANY manufacturer for anything other than passive backup. To use one for live media invites disruption -- your timeline will go white and you'll wonder why. Seat time in this too!

So use the drives you're happiest with. I happen to think that sticking to one brand is beneficial.

One man's poison is another man's table salt, or some other enjoyable condiment.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Set your customized window layout 1 or 2 by holding Option then click
Window menu>Arrange>and select Set Custom Layout 1 or 2 !

Then use Custom Layout 1 or 2 with Shift-U or Option-U !

Final Cut Studio 2 KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

> You folks may be using them in a rough and tough way which I don't. I don't hot plug them to
> dismount them, for instance, unless I've dragged them to trash first.

Okay, now I'm offended.

Loren, you are assuming that people like Joe, like me, like Mark etc. -- none of us neophytes -- are mistreating our drives. That gets me ticked. I honestly don't get why you have to get personal in defending a product you like which many of us don't. We all know that even a good company can make bad products, and a good brand can have bad apples. That batch of bad G-RAIDs, for example. So what made you say that we were the ones being "rough" on our drives? You've never observed us using them. What makes you think this?

I always dismount my drives before powering off. I never leave the power button on when unplugging or replugging cables. I don't leave the drives on when they aren't being used. I use DiskWarrior as part of my maintenance routine. What made you think I was mistreating the drives?

> I suggest you downpedal on generalities like that.
> But it ain't the whole picture and "never never" leaves out decent products and design at good
> prices, treated carefully.

I never claimed my view was "the whole picture". If any forum reader were assuming I was the penultimate expert in hardware, it'd be pretty much without foundation.

> Back to power issues. You're very lucky. In general, you shouldn't use bus-powered FireWire
> drives by ANY manufacturer

I don't use any bus-powered drives. I do own two, but they're for backups, not editing, and not real-time access of video or render files. Where did you see this? Again, you accuse me of mismanaging equipment with no basis.

Please, be careful how you phrase things. I remember having had this discussion with you before, and I remember being ticked at some of your statements which made similar assumptions about my competence. I respect your view on this brand, so you'll need to respect mine. I'm not telling you not to levy praise at Lacies, am I?


www.derekmok.com

I feel like jumping in with both feet here...

I've seen all manner of HDD problems, but in my extensive experience with trouble shooting for a very wide selection of people/companies over a great many years, Maxtor Mechs (especially in LaCie cases) have been (read carefully) the ONLY HDDs in 14 years of video editing that have ever broken through no physical mistreatment, under normal use... not a generalisation - a simple observation.

Of all my clients and colleagues guess which drives turn out to be the ones that most often break down?

I have 24TB of HDDs here - guess which one doesn't work?

The reason? I don't rate Maxtor AT ALL - cheap is what you get whether you pay it or not. You might be lucky to get one that stays working for a long time but I don't want that risk, I would suggest sticking to a more reliable manufacturer such as WD or Hitachi.

LaCie cases (not all but most) do not dissipate enough heat from the HDD(s)

The connections on LaCie cases are poor quality and is a major factor in the most recent problems I have encountered with them.

Again its my opinion but I'm often the one saying "I told you so", and if you ask me; I couldn't recommend using LaCie with any mech inside - you are far better buying a non branded enclosure, a lot are very solidly built, preferably with a fan to help cool the mech and often saving money as well.

I'm hoping that maybe in the coming year(s) that this changes as LaCie and Maxtor are bought by many people and I seriously don't want to read/hear another person has lost their work due to this.

Reading back through some of the 2700+ posts on LaCie it seems Maxtor & LaCie have been very problematic for a very long time.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Yeah, it is a bit hard to imply that we're all 'rough' on our drives. OK, yes, I did smash one, but I forgave that one for breaking. Only fair

I do think that it was the 'Big Disk' design Lacies that were the worst, and they all seemed to get very hot.

Hi Ben,

what about this thought:

The way things are going, we're not going to be using optical external hard drives much longer at all. Solid state is where technology is headed, and for all the right reasons: smaller size, far less heat, far less power (5V), thus longer battery life on laptops, no moving parts, no loss in performance as the drive fills, 1 million hours estimated product life, etc etc etc.

Read/Write speeds are well beyond firewire. There are 128 GB SATA SSD's already on the market claiming performance of up to 300MBs. Prices are still very high and disk sizes still too small for uncompressed video, but costs are decreasing quickly as production grows and capacities increase (I can remember paying $1.200 for a 9GB external when they first came out. Ouch). Overall growth predictions vary wildly, but the gist of it seems to be that SSD drives will be in about 60% of all new laptops by the end of next year. The MacBook Air is just one example.

Right now we're running upwards of 40TB on various drives plus 2 Sonnet Raids. I'm not putting any more money into LaCie or Seagate or WD or Hitachi or GRaid or any of the others just now unless I really need the storage. Sooner or later, they're headed for the basement next to the U-Matic decks. I'm hoping that the raids will last a bit longer, at least until they're written down off the books, but there too, I'm thinking the clock is already ticking.

Clay

Hey Clay

One fear I have for solid state is longevity. I still can't find any reliable numbers on how long data stays intact on SSDs (Solid State Disks).

Sure for acquisition this is a fantastic technology and the speed (as price comes down) will be a great boon for HD.

I would like to see some real world figures for SSD data integrity but right now its not mature enough to quote much more than a few years.

Backup storage I think will be the reason we still use HDDs for some time time yet. I too have an old FirePower firewire 9GB that still has all its data intact from early 2000 and even older SCSI that also work as well now as they did back in the day.

Cost for backup on a single 1TB Hitachi Deskstar at present is about £140 ($280) and decreasing rapidly.

---

As very rough figures I've put together a few numbers floating around giving approximate shelf life:

? Tape has a shelf life of 10 to 20 years depending on the quality of tape.

? Flexible magnetic media (ZIP, Floppy Disk, etc) about 10 years.

? Hard disks when stored correctly have at least a 14 year (and increasing) shelf life in my direct experience and an estimated 15 to 30 year shelf life in some cases.

? Optical media CDR/RW has a shelf life of about 5 to 10 years

? BlueRay is guessed to have a 50+year shelf life. Whether this applies to Writable BR remains to be seen.


All these times are dependent on good storage condition and environment of course.

---

My preferred solution at present is to backup onto single HDDs (not partitioned or part of RAID set) and as other storage mediums become available with greater storage then I'll transfer and consolidate the media keeping the old backups if I have room.


On the SSD side have a look at Texas Memory Systems 2TB SSD: [www.superssd.com]

I would imagine in the new 2 years I will have a few SSD drives in the loop - whether I use them for backup is another thing.



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Ben,

yep, that's all bang on.

Thanks for the link, fascinating read. I sent off for a quote, if nothing else it should be an interesting benchmark to follow.

Cheers,
Clay

Let us know what they quote you... I guess you went for a 2TB 4Gb Fiber?



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Want to thank everyone for all the great advice and help here (and sorry if I inadvertantly spawned a drive flame war!).

As I said, I ended up recapturing the reels using "capture now" (last time I'll use that...) and then although the length of the recaptures wasn't identical, when I reconnected the media to the offline ones I'd lost, everything was in perfect synch, so other than losing the time to recapture, didn't lose any work.

Show is pretty much finished except I have to shoot the host on Monday and put it in, and replace the voiceover, do graphics, color correction, etc. In case anyone's interested, here it is, the three day edit, 12 minutes 30 seconds:

http://www.mostlymagic.tv/demo/cultivating.mov

Cheers!

Jeff,

Thanks for confirming that an original "Capture Now" can be recaptured with full timecode reference intact; there has been a lot of debate here about whether using Capture Now for the original capture destroys your ability to do this. It would only work with device control enabled, of course.

>>I have to shoot the host on Monday....

Yep, sometimes you just gotta put them out of everyone's misery .

Scott

to be clear about Capture Now:

it's always been possible to re-capture, or rather batch capture a "Capture Now" clip, under the right conditions

to re-capture ANY clip all you need is reliable timecode, and enough Pre-Roll.

the potential problems with Capture Now are:

- you might capture the clip without enough pre-roll, so a batch capture cant start.

- you capture right up to the very last frame of usable timecode,
and when you re-capture, you hit this, and it freaks the capture out.
(like a train running off the end of the tracks)
it's a real drag to sit thru an hour long capture to have it just disappear on you at the last second
FCP has been much better at dealing with this in the last couple of versions.


also, as Jeff has discovered you CAN reconnect to manually re-captured material.
the issue here is your new capture might not have all the frames that are used in the edit.

let's say you had a shot that you originally captured with capture now from the very beginning of the tape,
and you;d used it right from the very beginning of the clip, lets say frame 00.00.00.00

now a batch cap just wont work on this, so you re-capture it, but this time you only get from 00.00.00.05.
the clip in the timeline CANT connect to this new media properly.
it will ether adsut the in point ,and youd lose the 5 frames in your cut,
OR, WORSE:
it might re-connect 5 frames out of sync.

i only seem to recall seeing a warning in FCP: a clip failed to reconnect properly, some of your "OUT-POINTS have been adjusted. it's never IN-POINT from memory, so maybe f the in-point is wrong it adjusts sync.

SO: if you had a really long conference, and you'd used every frame of a cap-now,
then recaptured with less frames, you could be in trouble,
especially, i imagine, if you;d used multi-clips.


when you look at it this way you can see that it's really only a few instances where cap now can lead to serious problems.
but it helps to know what the issues are.


nick

> but it helps to know what the issues are.

Yes -- and knowing about them does help you do the prep work to avoid the landmines. As I mentioned, I do use Capture Now -- but two Capture Now clips can't always be counted on to reconnect. Tell that to the 26-minute promo I had to conform by eye, clip by clip, because the combination of Capture Now and subclipping resulted in 95 per cent of the clips reconnecting wrong! No, I didn't do the capturing.

Can't Capture Now first and then look it up later. Gotta be prepared before you capture.


www.derekmok.com

>>Can't Capture Now first and then look it up later<<

You can, though. It's *better* to log and capture, it's *more sensible* to log and capture, but it's usually not the unrecoverable end of the world if you have used capture now and then lost or destroyed all your media.

> You can, though.

Try it on a tape with 18 timecode breaks! And before you guys say "We would have noticed", the people who aren't experienced with Capture Now also tend not to know how to deal with timecode breaks!


www.derekmok.com

Sorry...2 more pennies for Loren...

Ya gotta stop bashing people for posting their opinions about LaCies. You cannot tell people not to warn other people if they think something could be a detriment to their workflow. You'd think you were sellin' the darn things or a crusader on the Board of Directors. They are opinions based on personal experiences. If you own a Ford and it breaks down every week...and 4 of your neighbors had Fords that broke down every week, are you gonna tell people how great Fords are & recommend that your friends & family buy one even though 1 neighbor never had a problem with his? I would think you would WARN your friends & family against wasting their money.

Quit personalizing this already...jeez...

And I, like Derek, kinda resent you saying that we must be beating on the drives. My FW units always sit in a desktop way back on the desk next to a monitor or on (or next to) the CPU. It never gets touched, yanked out of the port while hot, never hits the floor or bumped in any way. I drag my icons to the trash on all firewire units to dismount - always.

LaCies...just...die (in my experiences). They have no fans. They are not designed for heavy A/V use. I won't spend another penny on one or take one for free. I wouldn't trust my work on 'em...and because I have had those nights where those beasties wouldn't boot up, I will tell everyone that will listen about my experiences because losing work is not fun and I don't want that to happen to any of my colleagues. All drives WILL fail - that's a fact. It's just a matter of when. It just so happens LaCies fail much more (and sooner) than any other unit I have ever heard of (in my experiences).

You and a handful of members here have had great experiences with LaCies. MORE POWER TO YOU. I'll bet the ranch that there are more negative experiences than positive.

Let's find out, shall we (and be honest, folks)? SEE THE POLL STICKY:

[www.lafcpug.org]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

a tape with 18 timecode breaks?

that's precisely when i'd use capture now.
with my preferences set to "Create New Clip" on TC break
cap now sees the breaks and captures around them.

these clips are all right to the bone regarding usable TC,
but i havent had problems with them lately.
(most of my re-capturing is from trimmed media.)


nick

for what it's worth,
down here, LaCies now come with a THREE year warrantee.
used to be one year.
(so i guess that's worth 2 years of use)

my dealer who was dirty on them for about 18 months is now ok with them again.


nick

I refuse to buy Lacies, but I won't refuse to use them if the client/boss insists. (The main Lacie-user client I have tends to lose about 60 per cent of its Lacie drives when starting a new project, though -- ie. they fail to mount after being in storage for a while.) Lost data is still pretty serious, though, even with the extended warranty. I backup like a maniac when I have to use one of these things.


www.derekmok.com