/TrustedReviews – The UK’s Premier Source for IT Reviews & News I’ve really been frustrated with external hard drives lately. I had a bunch of Maxtors and then some of them failed. And so I bought a Cobra, and now it has failed. Then I bought a couple of 500 gig LaCies and one of them was the worst performing drive I’ve ever seen. I took it back and got my money back.
I think I’m going to try this Seagate drive next. Trusted Reviews has given it a pretty good write up and I’ve heard positive things about Seagate drives in the past.
It is maddening how much difficulty I have to go through to back up my .mp3 files. I have all of my .mp3s organized in folders by band or artist letter, then by artist and then by album. When I try to copy the letter from one drive to my back up, inevitibly (on nearly every letter) I get an I/O device error that stops my copy job. No viruses, no spyware (at least according to MSFT’s own new software, Adaware and Spybot combined).
Why not have smarter OS software that says, hey, guess what, I can’t copy this file, should I just skip it and go on or should I abandon the whole copy job altogether. Of course this doesn’t happen nor is the I/O device error message in any way helpful. Instead I have to try to hunt through my folders to find where it left off. It also means that when I go to bed thinking that one of my 250gig drives will be backed up in the morning instead I’m greeted with the standard I/O device error about 10% of the way through the backup.
And why can’t the OS copy the software anyways? Is this some hidden DRM jedi mind trick? Why not have an OS that says, yes, I know something bad has happened to this file but guess what, I’m going to let you copy it anyway.
I get the same problems if I use my USB hub or connect directly in to the PC. I get the same problem on all four of my PCs. It really is frustrating and I’ve already lost a lot of my digital music over it. Hopefully Microsoft fixes this horrible way that Windows Explorer handles large copy jobs in Longhorn.
Trying to back up large amounts of digital media is still plagued with problems. I’m hoping that things go a little easier on me if I buy one of these Seagate drives.
Thanks, Digital Media Thoughts!