External hard drives and sound quality

Kijanki: Fat32 is garbage. Using non-journaled format is asking for a disaster.

Excellent point. One way in which such a disaster could happen is if power were to drop out at exactly the wrong moment. The file table could be corrupted, resulting in the entire contents of the drive being lost.

Kijanki: If bits would "decay" then checksum errors would be reported all the time with hundreds of thousand of files on computer, compressed files (including jpegs) would be corrupted etc.

Agreed 100%.

Blindjim: With windows it makes sense on the larger discs 500GB & up, to partition. Error checking and defragging then take way less time... and the data is easier to recover and back up.

Also, partitioning can make the computer faster and more responsive. Read and write times for files near the "beginning" of a hard drive (corresponding to the outermost parts of the platters) are typically about twice as fast as read and write times for files near the "end" of the drive (corresponding to the innermost parts of the platters). The reason being that since the platters are spinning at fixed rpm's, tangential velocity is much faster near the outer edge than near the inner edge.

Since the operating system and program files typically consume just a very small fraction of the size of a modern hard drive, it therefore makes sense to put them on a relatively small partition that is located at the "beginning" of the drive.

Blindjim: If you don't mind things slowing down a bit, and are keeping all the data off the OS drive, you can go a couple years I suppose. I've done that once... my oldest now retired box has 4yrs or more on it, maybe five, without wiping & reloading. it's a JIC box anyhow.

While it is very common for Windows PC's to become increasingly sluggish over time, that need not happen if the right practices are followed. I have five Windows XP PC's in my house, most of them a few years old, and one that I built 7 years ago. I have never had to do an os reinstall, and they all work as well as when they were new. See the second of my two posts dated 11/22/09 in this thread for what I attribute that to.

Best regards,
-- Al

Aren’t the File Allocation Tables written & rewritten as they are accessed such as a log of sorts?

Jim -- I think you might be referring to the fact that FAT32, NTFS, and many other file systems store information about when each file was created, modified, and most recently accessed. However what I was referring to were the file tables that define the location(s) of each file on the drive, which are updated whenever a file is written or modified or moved. Those file table updates typically require considerably more than one write operation, and if a power dropout or system crash occurs during that sequence of writes, the file tables of non-journaling file systems such as FAT32 can easily become corrupt.

NTFS, on the other hand, is a journaling file system, which means that it keeps track of the changes it intends to make in a journal before committing them to the main file system. The journal normally allows a crash or power dropout to be easily and quickly recovered from, invisibly to the user.

Another disadvantage of FAT32, btw, is that defragmenting a FAT32 partition is a much slower process than defragmenting an NTFS partition of comparable size.

You are correct that NTFS incorporates file permissions as metadata, while FAT32 does not. I have no idea, though, how the problem you ran into might have happened, in which permissions were somehow changed. I've never heard of that happening before. Just your luck!

Best regards,
-- Al

Granite Digital offers firewire cables that include a number of special design provisions that are claimed to make possible lengths up to 32 feet. They offer 1394A and 1394B cables in that length for $90 to $100. I have no experience with them, although I've used some of their other products (with good results). Datasheet pdf's are linked to here.

Also, firewire hubs and repeaters are widely available, which can also be used to extend firewire connection lengths.

Best regards,
-- Al