This deserved a new topic...prepare for a long story.

Ill start from the top. My last employer gave me a Coolgear external hard drive enclosure about a year ago. It's 4 250 gig IDE drives in a seperate enclosure connected by firewire. 1 WD caviar, 2 Maxtor Diamondmax, and one without a label. My last employer was a creative agency and this enclosure was used with Macs. One day my boss said "you want this?" i said yes, HE FORMATTED IT FROM HIS MAC, I HAVE XP PRO, i took it home plugged it in and everything worked great for a year until a week or so ago, when i converted them from FAT32 to NTFS. Then the **** hit the fan, "delayed write failed" and bam the drive doesn't show up anymore. After reading more than i ever wanted to read on this subject i've tried multiple times to format in both NTFS and FAT32 and NOTHING has solved this problem, nobody has any answers for me, just the same old **** i've tried 10 times over. What is going on with this thing and why did it work for a year and then, ironically, after i convert to NTFS it goes shithouse? Is it a Mac way of formatting that made it stable before? Diagnostic after diagnostic says they are ok, they work for a day or two then start up again. Like I said i've read more than any of you probably ever will in your life on this infamous "delayed write failed" issue that, as far as I know has never been REALLY fixed by microsoft. I'm about ready to risk it all and go Linux even though i know nothing about it because at least my data would be STABLE! I've even talked to a guy in LA who designs networks and still errors. If anyone can help me i'd be surprised...

/rant

LOL, that's it lets blame MS for a hardware failure.

I haven't had any problems with my external drives.