BlueMak

I am between two drives.
One is the Iomega drive http://www.e-shop.gr/show_per.phtml?id=PER.340171 for 219 euros.
The other is the WDs drive http://www.multirama.gr/Multirama/pr...B&cp_id=110373 for 199 euros.

Both are 500GB drives (which is like 460 free, right?). I would prefer to get the Iomega, especialy since Iomega Europe sells it for 178 euros, but for a month! now they do not accept credit cards due to a problem they are having... so if I want to buy it I have to get it from the above site, for 219. I already have a 80GB external drive from Iomega, bought in 2001, and I am very satisfied with it. It is already 5 and a half years old and still works great. I am worried about WD since I heard some bad things about their drives a while ago. I don't care much about speed but reliability is a big must.
Lacie, another brand, is out of the question after my Lacie ext drive died on me recently.

So, are WD drives good these days? Or should I pay the extra 20 and get the Iomega one?

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

>GSXR<mrbusa

Those Western Digital Mybook drives are pretty popular here in the states. I can't recall ever hearing anything bad about them.
Iomega is one of those companies that I just don't know much about. I don't think they manufacture there own harddrives for there enclosures. Don't quote me on that, but if they did wouldn't we see internal drives available for retail or oem? I believe Western Digital would be the better choice.

Grace

Both drives are quite good and reliable, but I would get the WD just for the warranty (2 years instead of one).

Or I would get this one, if you can stretch your budget a little more. These are really good drives:

http://www.e-shop.gr/show_per.phtml?id=PER.333530

Neshi

i got me an Iomega ext hardrive 1 year ago, 250Gb. Performs really well.
Haven't had any problems with it whatsoever.

__________________
If one does not attach himself to people and desire, never shall his heart be broken. But then, does he ever truly live?

Life is just too damn short for if's and maybe's

BlueMak

Thank you guys. I got the WD one. Currently formating it to ntfs. I was close, free space is 465.

I had no idea if toshiba made good drives.

Anyway, with the money saved i got 2 games too. Gears of War and R6Vegas(PC).

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

tastyweat

Good choice - While Iomega are a reasonable make - I personally prefer WD and I think the WD warranties tend to be better.

__________________

BlueMak

I formatted the drive last night, let it all night while I was sleeping because it felt going too slow. Four hours ago I decided to do a checkdisk (windows xp, with the check surface for errors) and while the first 3 stages went very fast, the 4th one was progressing very slow. After three and a half hours only about 1/6th or so of it had finished. Is this normal? I couldn't stop the process so I restarted windows to stop it.
I guess I will try this again tonight before I go to bed, but it feels too slow.
I copied a 40mb file in just a few seconds, then I tried an iso file of 4.5GBs in size and it took like 7 or so minutes.
I am just worried about the speed.
As far as I know I only have USB 2.0 (not 1.0,1.1) on my motherboard, and the drive is connected directly to the pc, not through an extension or a hub.
I am delaying copying files to the drive since I want to do a checkdisk first to be certain that it is ok.

BTW, are there any other than window's freeware programs that also check the drive's surface etc for errors?

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

PangingJr

the larger the disk drive, the longer the chkdsk /r will take. so it will take a long time on a large drive.

anyway, when you did a regular format on a partition (volume) the disk is already scanned for bad sectors, or in other words: the disk surface has already been tested (at least once).

BlueMak

You just saved me a day of waiting. Thank you.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

>GSXR<mrbusa

If I am not mistaken these drives come formatted in fat32 file system. When you formated the drive did you chose ntfs?

A 4.5gig file should take around 4 to 5 minutes on a modern usb2.0 external drive. Transfer speed and throughput of any drive will never be as high a mfg specs.

Chkdsk on a 500gig usb drive should take a long time. It still should finish but I'm not sure exactly how long it should take.

Do you have another system or someone that can transfer some files from there system to compare the speed?

BlueMak

Yes, NTFS.

I am currently copying about 18GBs of files and it has already taken about 30+ min. The windows says 18min remaining.

I don't have access to any other system to check it.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

>GSXR<mrbusa

There is something definitely wrong.
After you stopped chkdsk did you do another NTFS " Quick " format before you started transfering files?
Do you have all your mobo chipset drivers and bios up to date?
Have you switched USB ports and double checked connection and cable integrity?
The time displayed on the xp file transfer progress box will fluctuate allot and is hardly ever right at any time during the transfer. Open up windows time menu and use the clock to time your transfer of similar file sizes to what I have listed below.
Here are some reference numbers for my personal throughput from my system to a standard wd80gig 7200rpm IDE in a cheep USB 2.0 enclosure.
1.5gig- 1 minute 18 seconds- 2551files 15 folders
6.06gig- 5 minutes 40 seconds- 7232files 1309folders
1.61gig- 1 minute 15 seconds- 1 file

NTFS Quick format- less than 10 seconds
NTFS " FULL " format- to long to consider

BlueMak

C: to F:
test 1: 447MB in 2443 files, time 1:57:0 with anti virus resident shield on.
time 1:14.6 with shield off.
time 1:16.5 with shield on.

test 2: 68MB in 1 file, time 0:09:8

test 3: 4.5GB in 1 file, time 11:13:1 with shield off.

F: to C:
test 1: 447MB in 2443 files, time 0:37.9 with shield on.
time 0:50.2 with shielf off.
time 0:53.5 with shield on.

test 2: 68MB in 1 file, time 0:02:3

test 3: 4.5GB in 1 file, time 10.05.08 with shield off.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

PangingJr

interupt Windows's chkdsk may or may not cause file system damage.
personally, i have never gotten XP's NTFS file system problem, nor a (hardware) bad sector problem,
as a matter of fact, i don't do the chkdsk /r option much at all on my drives, however, i have never interupted chkdsk either, so in this case it is hard to perdict what is going to happen.
if you want a peace of mind, then you can just re-format it again before you use it.



even better, return the drive for a full refund, and then get a new one that has an e-SATA interface... j/k.

BlueMak

I used the utility from WD to quickly do a SMART check, and the disk is fine according to it.

I checked a forum (don't remember where, googled) and apparently there are many, if not most, other customers that also claim very slow speeds when using this drive.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

BlueMak

I got this from CNET customer reviews:



Full user opinion
I just setup the MY Book Essential and am overall pleased with it. I have a Dell 1.5Mhz desktop with two hard drives on it. I felt I needed to protect my historic family photos and music much better than what I had. It has a very quick setup with a front push button that cuts out the hard drive access when I'm performing difficult tasks on my computer and want to insure the safety of my backed up files. When I push the button to return it on, all four of my partitions appear back on my MY Computer screen within 30 seconds, one by one.
I immediately partitioned the hard drive into four primary partitions when I first got it using XP/Computer management and all went well including a format for each one. Two partitions are 100G and two are about 20-30G each. Awsome job in sizing how I want my backups to be. I personalized each hard drive with its own name.
I backed up all my personal files including my music/photos for a total of 30G on one of the partitions. It took about 9 hours to download. After calling WD tech support, it appears they mentioned that since I have the slower 1.0 USB ports on my Dell 1.5G 4300 computer, I would get the slower speed since the My Book has 2.0 USB compatablity. Makes sense to me, so I just ordered a 5 port 2.0 USB PCI card on ebay for $9.00 and am expecting it here. Uploading appeared to be a twice as fast on my brand new Dell 1505 Notebook that does have the 2.0 USB ports. So there you go. Get yourself the faster "Enhanced" 2.0 USB ports for the fast up/downloads.
Overall, the feel of the book is plastic and feels cheap. There's nothing special to it and the provided software is at a minimal.
I recommend the MY BOOK essentials if you need backup, lots of it.
Updated
by a793aa (see profile) - December 18, 2006

Followup when switching my computer USB to USB 2.0
I just changed out my computer USB ports to 2.0, and it has made a dramatic differance in my download speeds with the External Drive. The 30G of data that once took 9 hours to upload only took 2.0 hours on my WD My Book 250G External hard drive.


This guy is in even worse condition than me I think. 30GB in 2 hours?

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

>GSXR<mrbusa

Looking at the Newegg reviews backed up your find also. These drives are slow. Normally I don't look at retail reviews because you have allot of paid mfg employees making those user reviews. I do however post in and browse allot of forums and have seen allot of people with this drive. Why these drives are so popular and so slow is a mystery to me. Maybe you should consider returning it and making your own out of a really fast internal OEM drive and a good external enclosure.
I needed to backup a few more items and here is another number for you to compare. Same drive as my other post.
42gigs- 34minutes 30 seconds

BlueMak

No way I am going to try to copy that many now, 42gigs will (guessing) take like 1.5 hours, so I will try it sometime tomorrow.
I am going to start another checkdisk (from windows with ticking the second option for surface tests). The time now is 0427 so my guess is that it will finish by 1500 later today.

I want to make one thing clear though. I don't care if the speed is low because of design or something, the only thing that matters is that the drive is well manufactured and will not fail me and lose my data for at least another 2 years. So, it is not the speed by itself that worries me, but that it might hint to a problematic drive. I just wish I had some better program to check the drive than checkdisk.


I will post my findings after the end of the checkdisk. BTW, any way to have on file or on screen the results of the check disk from windows? It usualy just ends it when it finishes, and that doesn't help me that much.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

BlueMak

So, about 18 min ago I finaly started the chkdsk, dosprompt through windows.
Using the parameters: f v r x
Phase 1: no problems
Phase 2: Correcting error in index $I30 for file 40187
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive
chkdsk is recovering lost files A0151883.exe (27572) into directory file 40187
>> >> >> >> >> A0151884.ico (27573) into directory file 40187
>> >> >> >> >> A015....... (.......) >> >> >> >>
for about 15 more. Never heard of these files before though.

CHKDSK is veryfying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)
Cleaning up 1 unused index entries etc X2
Cleaning up 1 unused security descriptors
Fixing mirror copy of the security descriptors data stream.
Security descriptor verification completed.

CHKDSK is veryfying file data (stage 4 of 5)
2 percent completed (this is as of 0531, about 30 min after the begining of chkdsk)

I have already copied about 100GB of data.
I hope the above errors are nothing serious.

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

swimtech

I bought a 400g WD Mybook on the day after Thanksgiving - so far so good - but no actual timings myself to tell you about, however...

15Gigs an hour = 1 gig every 4 minutes or so... That "feels" normal.

__________________
It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.

>GSXR<mrbusa

Why are they so slow?
My drive does 1gig in less than a minute.

swimtech

Sorry, it just didn't sound so slow... I'll check right quick with mine and post back...

Edit: 571Mb went over in about 42 seconds via USB 2. I did notice it slowed significantly while copying embedded folders and files...

Try disabling your antivirus program while doing the transfer BlueMak... Thanks >GSXR<mrbusa...

Another edit: you know, I transferred over the entire win98 partition on my desktop machine (25Gigs worth - just a straight copy...) to this Mybook drive via USB 1 and it took hours and hours - started in the late pm and I left it running when I went to bed at 12:00am - not pretty, but it worked...

__________________
It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.

Grace

All that mess for something so simple...

That's an USB drive. Under MAXIMUM performance conditions, the speed of the specific drive is limited to 6-6.5MB/s read and 4.5-5MB/s write. Taking into account the faster value, 5MB/s write, you can write data to it with a speed of about 17.5GB per hour. That's the maximum performance value, which is usually not so realistic.


Which means...your drive seems pretty much fine to me!

BlueMak

Well, I did this --->> Mind you that it is min:sec:ms

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

BlueMak

Hmmm, what about
this?

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Grace

These are minor file system errors. It is almost certain that when running checkdisk you will end up with a couple of these. Nothing to worry about.

swimtech

Checkdisk just plain takes forever, even on internal drives, but it is good about fixing the errors on them too - let it work... And I would say that you must be copying over a bunch of smaller files with embedded files and folders rather than just large video files - really increases the copy time...

__________________
It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.

PangingJr

since you already start running the chkdsk program you should allow it to finish its jobs, be petiant with it, don't immediately stop the program. like i said earlier, it is going to take time under a large drive like yours.

for the next time, i'm giving these advices to you anyways... they are a repeating version and not much...
if another copy of those files are still exists, then just re-format the drive and start storing files on to it again.
if this is a new drive, run a regular (full) format to create or create a new file system on the drive(s) so that you can start using it, no need to run the chkdsk with the /r option over again.

swimtech

Yeah, frankly, 250M a minute isn't cow ka-ka at all... Considering the theoretical figures of 6M/sec is 360M a minute, and we all know we only get about half the theoretical speed in real life from our drives (or our wireless network!!!) - overall, your speed does really seem typical - give or take a bit. What matters is in what you are copying and what (other...) backround apps you are running I would think...

Ever watched your Recycle Bin take a full minute to dump that extracted DVD image that has 2,432 files in ten folders? Makes you wonder doesn't it? Every name, every allocated and marked sector, difference between actual file size and sector allocation size, etc... I don't anymore, but I used to...

__________________
It's not so much getting your way that matters or not - what matters is how you go about getting it.

BlueMak

For some reason you reminded me of a Vulcan.

chkdsk is going ok, 4/5 finished without problems, now on 5/5 at 55%

__________________

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.