Maxtor 80Gb Firewire HDD (Best Price ?)

Check the usual suspects, such as www.dabs.com and www.simply.co.uk.

However, be aware that I received an email today telling me that Maxtor is launching a new version containing using a faster-spinning (7,200rpm) IDE drive, and a faster FireWire/IDE interface, as with the current 60GByte 3000 model.

I'll post some details here later when I've finished uploading a rather large file to the office.

Bob C

Here's that release about the new, faster, 80GByte Maxtor. Lots of puffery there, but also some useful stuff, too.

Bob C

MAXTOR INTRODUCES IDEAL STORAGE PLATFORM
FOR DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION AND COLLECTION

Personal Storage 3000DV Increases Capacity 33%, Combines FireWire with 7200 rpm Performance

Maxtor Corporation (NYSE: MXO), today announced the availability of the
80 GB Personal Storage(tm) 3000DV, a 7200 rpm high performance external hard drive with FireWire(tm) (IEEE 1394) connectivity.

The 80GB Personal Storage 3000 DV is an ideal solution for storing and retrieving the increasingly large libraries of content generated by digital video editing, digital camcorders, digital cameras, scanners and
MP3 digital music. It is also useful for backing up internal hard disk drives, playing games and/or file sharing between PC and Apple Macintosh systems.

"FireWire is the standard for digital video editing due to its high speed, flexible connectivity, providing the ability to add storage quickly and easily. This proves that it can meet the need of the most
demanding users," said Tex Schenkkan, senior vice president, consumer
electronics and business development at Maxtor. "Using FireWire our Personal Storage devices are providing the performance that is not only ideal to make movies more productively, but can also provide a fast, user friendly storage solution to any home or business users handling digital portfolios of photographs, music, games or any other large
files."

According to the latest Cahners In-Stat research studies, over 35 million PC-based and consumer electronics products were shipped in 2000 equipped with IEEE 1394. The overall adoption of 1394 connections among PC hosts continues to gain ground and will grow by over 30% compound annual growth rate through 2005. Major manufacturers who currently support 1394 include Apple, Casio, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, NEC, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba.

"Because of their ease of use and high-performance, we see continued growth for 1394 devices and expect that by 2005, more than 200 million products will ship with the interface," said Joyce Putscher, Director, Converging Markets and Technologies Group, at Cahners In-Stat.

"Apple enabled the digital video revolution with its invention of FireWire, the interface of choice for today's high-speed peripherals, digital video camcorders and fast external hard drives," said Greg
Joswiak, Apple's senior director of Hardware Product Marketing. "With
Apple customers creating the next generation of digital productions
using iDVD, FinalCut Pro and iMovie applications, Maxtor's external storage devices provide the performance and capacity they need for storing their library of digital creations."

Available immediately through Maxtor's network of nationwide retailers in the US, and by the end of the year in Europe, the 80GB Personal Storage 3000DV has a suggested retail price of £271 (£319 inc. VAT)

To complement the Maxtor Personal Storage family, the company offers both 1394 PCI Adapter Card and 1394 CardBus products to upgrade previous-generation desktop and laptop computers not equipped with IEEE
1394 ports. Both are currently available at major retailers and directly from MaxtorDirect.com, priced at £42 (£49 inc. VAT) and £84 (£99 inc.VAT) respectively.

Maxtor and its products can be found at www.maxtor.com

Thanks for the update Bob, I think I'll go for the 5,400 80GB drive, reading the review in the April magazine, it looked OK, got good reviews.

Thanks again.

Well, cheating slightly, I can do it for less than £200 inc VAT. I picked up some Firewire enclosures last week at the Mac show for £80 ea inc VAT and you can get the 5400 80GB Maxtor for about £120.
I'm trying to decide whether it's worth paying an extra £35 before tax to get the 7200 version.

Perry,

Seeing as you're a fruity user like me, can/will you be trying to put an A03 in the External FireWire case - just to see if it works OK? (assuming you have an A03 that is )

Where can you buy an external IDE to firewire case for £80? I have seen such things advertised, but not for anything like this price.

As I have run out of PCI slots and have no IDE channels left on my PC, this might well be the answer. Do they work well, and if so, are they suitable for CD/DVD players/recorders as well as hard drives?

Thanks.

The company is called Mag(UK) but they apparently normally sell only on an OEM basis. I've just got the Maxtor (5400) drives and I'm struggling to get the units to mount. There seems to be a driver issue.

The cases are a very tight fit on a 3.5 HDD so no chance of using them for a standard 5 inch box like the A03.(and no I don't have one!)

You can get them retail from pc500: http://www.pc500.net/
the current price is £89.99 (exVAT) which is a good bit more of course.
I've now got them running fine by discarding the drivers for my previous Firewire EZDrive and just using the Apple System support.

(later) The 5400 Maxtor is giving well over 20MB/s data rate in the IceCube which is plenty for DV, even with an RT card as well.

I formatted one of them with NTFS round a mate's and it mounts fine on the Mac. I wanted to use Fat32 (on advice from Bob) but we couldn't get it to make one big 70GB+ partition*. Running a bench test on the G4 between the two drives (one Mac HFS+, one Win NTFS)shows identical performance so there must be minimal overhead to convert the file format, at least on large video type files.
* If anybody can send me a line by line instruction on how to format the drive in Fat32 (in Win2000) then this Mac head would be grateful!
perry.mitchell@btinternet.com

Perry,

Open up My COmputer

Right Click on the drive

Choose Format

Make sure that you choose FAT32 as the File Format.

At least, that's how you can do it under XP, and I don't remember it being different under Win2K.

If I'm wrong, just press F1 (help) while My Computer is active and search for Format, and it will tell you what to do.

Bob C

Point is (under Win2000) that it wouldn't let us format that large a partition. In exactly the same utility it worked fine by selecting NTFS. Knowing Windows as little as I do, I know that I'm probably coming at it from the wrong direction.

Perry,

Before I posted my previous reply on Thursday night, I tried to install Win2K here, running under Virtual PC (on a Win XP machine), but, when I rebooted after installing Virtual PC, my BT ADSL had stopped working.

I concluded that this must be as a result of the VPC installation, so uninstalled and restarted - ADSL still not working; I then did a restore to previous state before that installation - still not working; I dropped back one further restore state - still not working; I went to bed.

In the morning, before going to work, I re-installed Windows XP - still not working.

I went to work and, in the late afternoon phoned home, only to be told by my son that BT Internet was working fine.

THANKS BT!!!!!

I'm going to try doing this all again on another (less "mission-critical") PC and will report back as soon as I can on whether I have any such problem.

Bob C

One day, lack of sleep (and inate stupidity) will be the death of me!

Of course, it's only when I'd got Virtual PC set up, and Win2K installed, and was installing SP2 that I remembered something very important about Virtual PC - it has no emulation of OHCI FireWire ports, so I've been wasting my time doint this to check out formatting a drive in a FireWire drive bay.

Doh!

So, for the moment, there's no way I can check out doing this and report whether I have the same problem - though I strongly doubt that others who'd try to format a HDD in a FireWire case on a proper Win2K system will have the same problem.

The workaround, I suspect, may be to take the drive out of the bay, connect it temporarily in place of the boot HDD, and use Windows's FDISK and FORMAT utilities.
(Oh, and for safety's sake, if there are any other HDDs installed, disconnect them as well, cos you don't want to destroy the contents by mistake!).

Were that not sufficient hassle, these two programs run from DOS - so you'll need a Win98SE boot floppy to get into DOS - and are NOT in any way intuitive to use!

Any old DOS boot floppy won't do, cos it's only versions of Windows including and after Win98SE that format to FAT32.

There is a FAQ about why you need to use them and how - and this may help.

It's called, "I need to fdisk and format a hard drive. Why, and how?", and is located at: http://www.dvdoctor.net/cgi-bin/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000022.html

Bob C

Perry,

On reflection, why not just take the drive back to your place and format it as FAT32 on your Mac?

This is one of the standard format options in current versions of Mac OS.

Bob

Aha - I did wonder although it is simply called 'DOS Format' in the Mac Finder 'Erase' function.

Alternatively, what is the downside of leaving it as NTFS? I obviously don't need to worry about pre Windows98 PCs.

Perry,

I'd completely missed your earlier comment about it being okay when set up as NTFS - I read this as being the Mac advanced file system (the initials of which look a lot like NTFS).

I didn't even know that Mac OS could read NTFS, so I'm not at all sure I can advise about the pros and cons of its use under Mac OS!

Bob

mmm - HFS+ and NTFS look similar?

Anyway, you're still missing the point Bob. NTFS works fine on the Mac, I just need to know what are the downsides of using it for exchange with Win boxes? As I said, I don't need to worry about pre W98, how about all the current versions of Windows kicking around. Can I read and write to a NTFS formatted drive with all of them?

Perry

quote:Originally posted by PerryMitchell:
mmm - HFS+ and NTFS look similar?

Er, actually, yes, when you have to read postings and emails as quickly as I MUST do if I am to read all that I need to read.

Anyway, you're still missing the point Bob. NTFS works fine on the Mac, I just need to know what are the downsides of using it for exchange with Win boxes? As I said, I don't need to worry about pre W98, how about all the current versions of Windows kicking around. Can I read and write to a NTFS formatted drive with all of them?

No, I'm not missing the point. As I said, I don't know what the downsides are, since I didn't even know you could read and write to NTFS under Mac OS.

Bob C

This is a LONG one, sorry, but, those of you who are interested in this stuff will find it worthwhile, I hope.

So, to the chase...

...My curiosity was aroused, so I did bring home a BIG HDD to see whether it would be possible to format it as one FAT32 partition using Win2K - to check out the problem Perry had reported.

I hasten to add, before going on, that my theoretical knowledge here is weak, to say the least, but it was a bit stronger by the end.

Anyway, I brought home a Western Digital 100GB model, in an ADS Pyro FireWire Drive Bay, and looked at it using Drive Manager - first in Windows 2000 (on a laptop PC), then under Windows XP Home (on a desktop PC).

In each case, even though the drive was already formatted as FAT32, the OS appeared only to be letting me reformat it as NTFS, even if I first deleted the partition and then tried again to carry out a format.

HOWEVER, I did figure out how to format the drive as FAT32!!! Though, for the moment I've only tested this with Windows 2000.

What I must add straightaway, is that I have been unable to format the entire drive as FAT32. What I had to do was break it up into partitions that were smaller than 32GByte in size.

In Disk Management, having selected to format the disk, you have a window that comes up with a number of options, including "Allocation Unit Size". This, I think, is what I (and possibly you) better know as cluster size.

This setting is there so you can choose the minimum amount of space taken up on the disk by the smallest possible size of file, the rationale being that, if you want to save disk space, you opt for a small figure - so that there is not too much wasted space (by, for example, each 1K file wasting 31K, if the cluster size is set to 32K).

I messed around a bit, and thought that the smallest possible allocation size I could select was 1024Bytes but this was rejected by Disk Management.

After a lot more messing about, with different allocation sizes being rejected, with messages such as, "Disk too big", I then picked the "Default" allocation size option, and the disk started formatting.

That was a few minutes ago, and I'm now twiddling my thumbs waiting for this huge disk to format; so I'll pause what I'm doing here and start again when the format has finished and I can see that the drive definitely has been formatted as FAT32.

If you are wondering why I need to carry out that double check, it's because when I first tried to do this format, I picked, "Quick Format" - well, wouldn't you have? - and discovered when it had finished that it had still formatted as NTFS!!

I’m sort of assuming that this was logical, in a way, because, perhaps, you can't quick-format a disk that is using a different file system.

So now I've unticked the Quick format box and am doing a full format. At the rate it's going, I reckon the whole business may take 20-30 mins or even more!

Some time later...

...well, it took about 40 mins and, when it finished, it hadn't finished at all!

At the very last moment it came up with an error saying, Disk size (or was it Volume size?) too big!

Aaagh!

Next stop (and, really, it should have been my very first stop) was www.google.com, where I searched about to try to get a better theoretical understanding of FAT32.

Here's the first place I went to: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/partFAT32-c.html

This was suggesting that:

1/ FAT32 can't have cluster sizes larger than 32K

2/ FAT32 can't be used for HDDs (or, more accurately, partitions) larger than 32GByte.

Trouble is, the author admits that he's not really sure!!!

Furthermore, as I said earlier, the drive was partition as FAT32 - all of it - before I started messing around with it.

So, here's my initial hypothesis:

Win2K knows full well that it's a bad idea to use FAT32 for drives/partitions larger than 32GByte, and simply prevents you from doing this bad thing.

And, it's a bad thing, at least according to the url mentioned above, because, with this size of partition, the FAT itself - the file allocation table (the index, if you will, of the contents of the disk/partition) grows to an unmanageable size.

So, still, I didn't have a reasonable theoretical understanding of what was going on, so it was back to google.

Google was also pointing to the same site as referenced above, but a different page that was interesting and useful, because it explained about NTFS's default cluster size: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/archCluster-c.html

Trouble is, it didn't tell me what I needed to know.

Next stop was this page on Microsoft's site: http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;q140365

Again, interesting, but not what I needed.

Next was: http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63

This was a bit more like it, since, although it did not explain the theory, it did make sense of the practical problems I'd been having, by saying that, as I had supposed, Microsoft had deliberately set up Win2K and XP so that they cannot format partitions larger than 32GByte as FAT 32.

In particular, it has these comments,
-----------
You cannot format a volume larger than 32GB in size using the FAT32 file system in Win2K/XP.

The Win2K/XP FastFAT driver can mount and support volumes larger than 32 GB that use the FAT32 file system (subject to the other limits), but you cannot create one using the Format tool.

This behaviour is by design.

Microsoft recommends using NTFS for partitions greater than 32GB.

If you need to format a FAT32 partition greater than 32GB, you will need to do it under Windows 98/SE/ME.
========================

The next place I arrived at, courtesy of the url above, was: http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=KB;EN-US;q263044

This explains that there is a problem with using Fdisk (under some circumstances) to manage drives/partitions larger than 64GByte; and this seemed very relevant because when I had (mid-way through the proceedings) connected up the drive via FireWire to a Win 98SE machine, Fdisk (running in a DOS window) had not been able to see the drive at all (and Device Manager hadn’t recognised it properly, either).

This url also has a pointer to a small fix that can be downloaded to overcome this problem. So I've downloaded it - but more on that in a bit!

I did actually find out, for sure (I hope) what is the largest FAT32 partition you can have, thanks to the url below, which was being pointed to by the anandtech.com url up above. http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=kb;en-us;Q154997

The answer is, FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size. (I guess someone may be along here with the real theory behind this, but I'll settle for knowing what the limit is, for now).

If you find this stuff interesting, then that Microsoft url is worth reading, even though it clearly must have been written as an explanation for those considering moving from FAT16 to FAT32.

So, here's where I am now:

* I understand why Win2K and XP prevent users from creating FAT 32 partitions larger than 32GByte

* I know that, in theory, 98SE's Fdisk utility can create FAT32 partitions as large as 2terabytes.

* I don't know yet whether the bug fix for Fdisk I've just downloaded will enable me Fdisk to see all of the 100GByte WD HDD when that drive is located in a FireWire case.

I'm going to try that next. I may or may not report back further tonight, depending on how it goes.

Bob C

[This message has been edited by bcrabtree (edited 08 December 2001).]

Well, I installed the updater for Fdisk, and blimey, it works!

It's a tiny download (176KByte) and takes only a minute to install - though a reboot is needed afterwards.

Having installed it, and rebooted, the 100GB WD drive is now seen in device manager and correctly identified; and Fdisk (which sees it now, too) is currently being used to partition it as FAT32.

This doesn't mean I'm recommending anyone should format such a big drive as a single FAT32 partition - I think the stuff in my last posting makes reasonably clear that this is not ideal.

However, I just wanted to know it could be done, and how.

That said, I'm guessing that the problems which Microsoft identifies with having very large FAT32 partitions such as this (see the urls in my previous posting) are probably less serious for drives that are used for video - which will NOT have anywhere near so many files on them as
drives used, say, for booting or for programs.

So, I think it's not necessary to panic if you already using a large (over 32GB) FAT partition for capture, storage and editing of video files.

However, if you were going to make the move to Win2K or Win XP anyway, then it's probably best to reformat such drives as NTFS.

Be aware, though, MS gives reasons (again see urls above) why if you do want to convert a drive from FAT32 to NTFS, you should completely reformat it, rather than use the converter option that Win2K and XP offer.

Bob C

Just finished fdisking and formatting the big fella as FAT32, and the huge amount of time it's taken to do is just one more reason, in my humble opinion, to consider formatting these big drives as NTFS - which carries out these changes FAR, FAR more speedily.

For the record, the drive's formatted capacity as FAT32 is 93.1GByte.

Now, since the drive isn't 100GB at all, but is instead 100 x 1000MByte (cos HDD makers cheat when reporting disk size, and consider 1000MByte to be a Gigabyte, when, in truth it's actually 1024MByte), you'd expect the formatted capacity to be 100/1.024 ie 97.656GByte.

So just formatting the disk (and, possibly also partly because of the size of the FAT), has consumed over 4.5GByte.

I suppose what I'll have to do next is see what it's formatted capacity is under NTFS, to see if that makes better use of the available space.

But not tonight!

Bob C

[This message has been edited by bcrabtree (edited 08 December 2001).]

Well, formatted as NTFS, the available space is little different than for FAT32 - it's 93.16GB, rather than 93.1GB.

I carried out some speed tests, too.

Under FAT32

Pinnacle DVExpert - Write - 12.92MB/sec; Read 13.41MB/sec

Raptor Test - Write 12MB/sec; Read 13MB/sec

Under NTFS

Pinnacle DVExpert - Write - 14.22MB/sec; Read 13.33MB/sec

Raptor Test - Write 13MB/sec; Read 13MB/sec

Bob C

Thanks Bob
It's nice to know that this PC idjit in my ignorance trod almost exactly the same path as you in your relative enlightenment!

Just to round off the discussion from my point of view, I just need to know which File System is used when the Mac formats with the 'DOS' option.

The Maxtor 80Gb Firewire HDD drive comes ready formatted as one FAT32 partition.

You can buy an assortment of firewire and USB enclosures, including ice-cube from Worldspan Communications (span.com), who advertise in Computer Video. I have not bought from them myself, so have no knowledge of their service.