All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

you sound like you’re using firewire. the prolific is an awful chipset and if you could ditch it for a newer version oxford 911, all would go well. but i’m still hanging onto my prolific as well since i paid a fair amount of money for it and can’t see myself throwing it away like that. you can only flash the firmware when using a usb cable. firewire doesn’t work. also, there are three revisions of the chipset, A, B, and C. the later two allow end user flashing whereas the first one doesn’t. it is said that there is some .204 firmware that fixes the delayed write errors but that they’re back in the later ones. i’m unable to get ahold of the .204 one but only the newer two versions available from prolific’s website and while it does help with the delayed write errors a lot, it doesn’t fix it altogether and a problem like the delayed write error is very, very serious as it can and will eventually kill all the data. in the meantime, i’ve resorted to the much slower and choppy usb (i have too many devices on usb all using a lot of the bandwidth) or using a beater 5.25″ enclosure that has the oxford chipset (which by the way i’ve seen record firewire speeds out of). i guess i wish you the best of luck. i’m sorry i don’t really have a solution for you, except maybe if you could find the .204 version, which by word of mouth fixes it, but i haven’t tried to see so myself.

Posted by ziddey on 21 February 2006 @ 10pm

Well I think I finally found the answer to my proble, i did suspect the firewire been the problem but now im sure. I have a 250gig hard drive, i backed up all my 2005 files into it, and used on the later months of 2005 via usb with no problem but than i thought, well let’s upgrade the cable to firewire since the external enclosure was firewire ready, so i go the local store and buy my self a firewire cable, the next day i turn on the hard drive, boom! my hard drive is corrupt and there are no files on my system, since im not a computer person, i thought my drive was dead, so I threw it in a box and about 2 weeks ago, i was about to dump it, but i said, let me see if i can format it, and i could so i did, cleaned it all out, and put a few non important files to test it out, mess with it a few minutes and boom! corrupt message again. so i went to my cable’s box and pulled out my old usb cable, attached it to the drive, formated the hard drive and i have not had a problem ever since. but, i lost all the data files from 2005, i do entertainment news, so i lost videos photos and a lot of audio interviews. but at least the darn thing is working fine now.

Posted by Kaiman on 20 September 2006 @ 9pm

I sporadically run Replicator, but when I do, it backs up just fine. I never learned if you’re not supposed to defrag an external hard drive.

Sorry to hear you lost all your files from last year. What’s even worse is that an older USB cable did the trick. It’s kind of cynical, isn’t it?

Posted by Bryan on 20 September 2006 @ 10pm

I just realized what the problem might be: I might’ve not had enough space left for defragmenting.

Posted by Bryan on 20 September 2006 @ 10pm