Using External drive to archive!

[CheechOZ]

I am not sure what i should do here, so I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this matter that is just bothering me to no end! I read somewhere that ripping discs from external enclosed drives is not the same as internal ones! So what I want to know, is there any degrading audio quality ripping from an external enclosed USB drive (It's a Plextor), as compared to an internal IDE drive (also a Plex). This might sound stupid, but please explain the differences, if any, thanks!

[Spoon]

Re: Using External drive to archive!

Try with AccurateRip that will tell 100% if rips are without error. Many enclosures have problems supporting the advanced ripping features, such as c2 or FUA cache disable, apart from that they rip ok.

[bhoar]

Re: Using External drive to archive!

My summary:

Interface	Pros					Cons

SCSI		Supports All Drive Features		Most SCSI drives are old and slow.
IDE		Supports All Drive Features		Susceptable to DMA->PIO Windows "feature".
SATA		Supports All Dirve Features		Newer, may have other windows/bios driver issues.
Firewire	Most compatible of external interfaces	Some bridges don't support all drive features
USB 2.0		Most common of external interfaces	Most bridges don't support all drive features
USB 1.x		None					Slow and awful.

By "drive features" I mean one or more of: cache probing/enable/disable, c2 error probing/detection, overread, etc.

<spoon: edited so can see text>
-brendan

[Spoon]

Re: Using External drive to archive!

I am running Vista and have a IDE cd-rom drop down to PIO mode on a bad disc (suddenly interrupts are taking up 100% of one cpu when ripping), vista automatically went back to DMA mode after about 5 mintues.

[bhoar]

Re: Using External drive to archive!

I am running Vista and have a IDE cd-rom drop down to PIO mode on a bad disc (suddenly interrupts are taking up 100% of one cpu when ripping), vista automatically went back to DMA mode after about 5 mintues.

That would seem to indicate that, unlike XP/2000/2003, Vista will automatically negotiate back up to DMA after it drops an IDE channel down to PIO mode. One can only hope that fix ends up being back-ported in the next XP service pack...

-brendan

[LtData]

Re: Using External drive to archive!

There is a registry entry you can make that will have XP put the drive back in DMA mode after a few successful reads, it has worked fine for me in XP: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472/

[CheechOZ]

Re: Using External drive to archive!

Try with AccurateRip that will tell 100% if rips are without error. Many enclosures have problems supporting the advanced ripping features, such as c2 or FUA cache disable, apart from that they rip ok.

Oh so as long as the rips are coming out accurate rip certified or secure by two passes, then I'm assured of clean and error free rips?