Gregory Weston <uce@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> In article <lc7ic2rd2y.fsf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Douglas Alan <doug@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> With external drives (or at least external USB drives), a drive will
>> often pause for a little bit, and in the meantime, the OS returns
>> errors (or perhaps presents an empty filesystem) to the application.
>> This makes some applications (like iTunes, for instance) completely
>> spaz, and the only fix is to logout and log back in. Sometimes, the
>> database even gets corrupted.
> I have not seen the behavior you're describing, in years of using
> external FireWire, SCSI and USB storage devices.
Well, I *assure* you that it does happen. For me, with two different
types of external disk drives on two different Macs, one Intel-based
one and one Power-PC based.
One of the drives (a Western Digital MyBook) wants to periodically
spin itself down, and when it does that, often iTunes will go nuts and
doesn't recover without a reboot. In order to prevent the drive from
spinning down, I made a little cron job that cats a file on the disk
every few minutes. Sometimes, however cat doesn't even see the file.
I.e., it's gone tem****arily missing, while the drive is contemplating
its navel. (I know for sure this happens, as I get an email from
cron every time that it does.)
If I boot off of the very same drive, however, this problem does not
occur.
On the other machine, I have an external USB drive that seems to be
less problematic, but if it gets accidentally turned off, even when
the filesystem is mounted using "mount", the mount point ends up being
empty. "df" will show the filesystem as still being there, and "df ."
works fine, showing the filesystem to be mounted, but the filesystem
has absolutely nothing inside of it. Turning the disk drive back on
does not fix the situation.
|>oug
|
