Problems with Prolific 3507 firewire/USB combo drive

[Matt_D]

I am running a laptop with WinXP Pro SP2 and have been having problem with a Speeze enclosure using the Prolific 3507 combo controller. I have tested it extensively with large video files that I was working on in Premiere and found it to corrupt the NTFS partition information when connected via firewire. I could not recover the partition table when this happened I recovered the data using GetDataBack for NTFS and reformatted the drive. This has happened 3 times using the firewire interface, and seems to happen under extensive IO operations. Since, I have formatted again and am using USB 2.0. It has not had any problems yet though it is a little slower with this interface.

I have searched all over the net and can't find a solution to this. I also have a TDK Indi DVD writer connected through firewire and that hasn't been a problem.

The drive is a WD 200GB 7200 rpm.

[royfl]

I have a very similar problem with Plumax PM-525C2-PPS and -PPB combo USB 2.0 & Firewire 1394 external enclosures. These enclosures use the Prolific 3507 combo controller. The problem is that when connected to the computer using the Firewire interface, the boot sectors and perhaps other sectors of all of the partitions on the hard drive eventually get trashed. The partition table on the drive seems to be OK. It is just all of the partitions that are trashed. This has happened twice for me. The first time I used GetDataBack to get most of my data back from the five partitions that were trashed on a 40GB Maxtor disk. I reformatted all of the partitions and reconnected the disk using the USB interface instead, and it has been OK for two months. After that fiasco, as a test, I hooked up a different disk that I have a complete backup of in a PM-525C2-PPS using Firewire. This disk contains only files that I read, that is, I have not written to the disk. Well, yesterday, the second disk suffered the same failure. The boot sector was trashed. I used GetDataBack again and was able to recover all files except files in the root directory. So whatever trashing is occurring seems to affect more than just the boot sector. The recovered files compared 99.999% the same as the files in my backup. There were just a couple of unexplainable discrepancies.

My solution for now is to avoid using the Plumax PM-525C2-PPS and -PPB for critical data and stop using their Firewire interface. I added another bank of USB 2.0 ports to my PC so I can use the USB interface.

The sad thing is that I could have purchased nearly identical enclosures using the Oxford 911 chip for just $5 each more than the cost of the defective ones. Anyone considering purchase of the defective Plumax PM-525C2-PPS and -PPB should instead consider Plumax PM-525C2-PTS and -PTB which are advertised as using the Oxford 911. I have not heard of any data loss problems associated with the Oxford chip. All four of these enclosures are available from http://www.dealsonic.com/ which is where I purchased the defective enclosures. I had no problems with the purchase - just a bad choice of product to buy on my part. I would purchase from them again.

Roy