FCP "ejecting" my external hardive

Hello I have a G5, (0SX) and I am using 2- Western Digital Book external hardives.
The second external hardrive, daisy chained to the main external hardrive using a firewire800, was ejected from my desktop when FCP unexpectedly quit. (The one directly connected to G5 is still shows up on desktop)

I am not sure how to remount the hardrive. What is the safest way to troubleshoot? ( I have quite a bit of footage that I would not like to loose)

Thank you,
Dorian

Open up disk utilities and select the unmounted drive, then simply hit the 'mount' button!!

Thank you for your response--Do you know if info will be erased because of unexpected ejection?

It will not be erased...but to be safe, you should simply restart your machine and all should come back online.

A little advice: back up those "MyBook" drives if they do decide to come back up...get rid of them. They aren't even good for backing up. They have a tendency to go on vacation and never return. If you value your data, you will spend a few bucks on a serious unit like a quad interface CalDigit VR:

[www.timelinedigitalinc.com]

[www.timelinedigitalinc.com]

[www.timelinedigitalinc.com]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

If the drive keeps ejecting, that could be either bad connections (get a new FW cable) or the power brick is defective. Happens pretty often, especially with older drives. Get a new power brick.

Definetly backup first though, when drives start acting buggy, it's a sign that the unit itself is defective and that rather soon, things are going to go seriously wrong.

And prepare a copy of DiskWarrior. Barring bad hardware/connections, drives losing their connection to the computer are often symptoms of a corrupted (or degrading) directory.


www.derekmok.com

I'm gonna echo Joe on this one. I've had experience with about 7 or 8 of those Western Digital "My Book" drives, and every SINGLE one has crapped the bed. The drives always seem to be okay data-wise, but the external enclosures don't seem to handle power very well. I've never purchased one for my own use, rather the WD's I've used have been supplied by clients. They always seem to buy the cheapest drives, then wonder why they explode. With each of the WD's I've worked with, I've talked the client into buying SATA external enclosures to stick the drives in and pitched the WD enclosures.

Like I said, no long-term data loss (yet), but I would avoid those things like the plague. Just not worth the headache and potential loss of data to save a few bucks.

First of all thank you all for your help-- much appreciated--- this forum has been so instructive.
I keep hearing and reading that external drives, whatever quality, are not stable, but internal drives run out of room fairly quickly and its not a good idea to be tapping all the power from your G5. I would rather use an external drive since I am new at this and I don't want to be fussing inside my G5 if I really don't know what I'm doing. Any thoughts.. ..suggestions? Thanks again.

> I keep hearing and reading that external drives, whatever quality, are not stable

That's not exactly true. You have to know how to keep external drives maintained and implement certain safeguards. But external drives are practically inseparable from digital editing now and it's not really possible to get too paranoid about them.

Also, it's always easier if you get back to basics. If your master footage is on timecoded tapes, you don't even need that much ironclad storage space to make sure your work is protected. Save the project files, archive them often and well, in addition to any non-expendable media. And those tasks are a lot easier if you know how to manage your portable drives.


www.derekmok.com

Quote

I keep hearing and reading that external drives, whatever quality, are not stable

Whoever is telling you that or wherever you are reading that - those folks don't work at a high level in our industry. The pretty-much "standard editing set-up" is a CPU with a boot drive and a RAID (usually) external unit either Firewire 800 or eSATA. The "Instability" part comes from your choice of that external unit. Personally, I use CalDigit products. No LaCie, WD MyBook, Phantom, Iomega, etc...those are on my "junk" list.

"Internal vs External"? There is no contest here IMHO. External RAID wins every time. As a matter of fact, I know very few set-up these days that people are using internal drives for anything else than the boot drive.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

[ daisy chained to the main external hardrive ]

I'm not liking that no matter *what* kind of storage....

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

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Hello- I took your advice and purchased a quad interface CalDigit VR- this is for new footage. I will connect this to my mac with a Firewire800 (no e-sata connection on my Mac G5 unfortunately)
However I have the other 2 MyBooks external drives (with footage for former project still editing) daisy chained to each other with firewire800, but connected to my MAC -G5 with a Firewire400.
This seems to work ok but is it not safe to have them connected to each other using an FW800 but one of the drives connected to computer using FW400?
(this is the only combination I'm able to use with the connections available on my MACG5 to keep these drives connected - because I need the one Firewire800 connection on my Mac for the new CalDigit VR drive.
Thanks again for your help

> This seems to work ok but is it not safe to have them connected to each other using an FW800
> but one of the drives connected to computer using FW400?

I don't think it's "unsafe" per se, but in my experience, a chain with both FireWire 800 and FireWire 400 will result in data rates that are lower than either one alone. (Not sure about the science behind that; maybe somebody else can correct me)

My response would be: Don't use both at the same time. Especially since MyBooks are the devil. Use them when you need them, and use the CalDigit when you need it. Or move everything to a drive that's large enough for everything.


www.derekmok.com

I am installing the Cal digit external drive unit and it is asking me to choose destination volume for the Cal digit Raid Tool- on my MAC hardrive or the actual external Caldigit drive- what do you recommend?
Thanks again-- I took your advice about only having one external device connected at a time and purchased Disk Warrior.
-Dorian

>This seems to work ok but is it not safe to have them connected to each other using an FW800
>but one of the drives connected to computer using FW400?

Having the FW 400 connection at the bottom of the chain slows every connection down to that speed. If you are daisy chaining firewire devices, the slowest device should always be at the end of the chain. Better to avoid daisy chaining if you can.



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