I always knew this day would come...
This morning I grabbed the *istD and shot a few snaps of tulips covered with snow. (It was 85F last Sunday, 35 today with snow...)
After filling up the CF card I dumped it onto the X Drive II. Nothing stressed the drive - I was not jostling it around or anything. It was just sitting on my dining room table, hooked up the 12v lead acid backup battery, dumping the card.
I later formatted the card and took a few more shots, and again dumped those onto the X Drive.
When I went to transfer the images to my PC, I found that only the first 8 images from the first CF card dump made it onto the X Drive. The other 60 some PEF files just were not there. There was one corrupted file, and after that no more files.
The battery was fine (actually, using the 12v supplemental battery has more or less rehabituated the drive's Li Ion battery, and it can now dump a couple of gigs without any outside battery support. The external battery did apparently die during the transfer, so maybe that impacted things.)
So... I'm flummoxed. The photos were not terribly important, and I'd feel a lot worse if I lost a day's field work vs stuff shot around my house. I'm not sure if the problem was the drive or the CF card.
I ran the standard windows disk check and surface scan on the X Drive and, after fixing the one corrupted file, it checked out fine.
I also ran the same diagnostics on the CF Card - even though the CF card does not have a surface to check per se, I assume that the 'scan for bad sectors' utility functions virtually the same on the CF card as it would on a physical drive. Is that an accurate assumption? As with the X drive, it checks out fine.
Hopefully this was just an anomaly - maybe when the external battery died it triggered a shut down in the X Drive. I rather doubt that since that is not what happens when I cut the power from the wall adapter, and the X Drive's internal battery was still showing good after dumping the second card.
That's the most worrisome thing about this device - you just gotta have faith that the data is being copied accurately, and it only takes one mishaps to leave you wondering there after...
- MCC
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Mark Cassino Photography
Kalamazoo, MI
www.markcassino.com
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