P2 Card dump reader/hard drive creating crazy partitions

K

Krunko

Well-known member
So I rented an HVX200 with the P2 card storage device. We bought one for work, but it won't be in until Thursday.

Anyways, I tried dumping the data off the 60gb hard drive. It took me about 3 different computers until I found one that would actually recognize the device. Finally, once I found a computer that would recognize it i realized that it created a new drive partition for every single time I would dump a card.

for instance, the computer has a c: and d: drive already...you plug in the p2 storage device via USB and E woudl show up...wait a few seconds, then F, then G...just kept going.

Very annoying. Anyone else have this problem?
 
Krunko said:
So I rented an HVX200 with the P2 card storage device. We bought one for work, but it won't be in until Thursday.

Anyways, I tried dumping the data off the 60gb hard drive. It took me about 3 different computers until I found one that would actually recognize the device. Finally, once I found a computer that would recognize it i realized that it created a new drive partition for every single time I would dump a card.

for instance, the computer has a c: and d: drive already...you plug in the p2 storage device via USB and E woudl show up...wait a few seconds, then F, then G...just kept going.

Very annoying. Anyone else have this problem?
Click to expand...

Nothing wrong there, thats how it works. A partition for each card.
 
Milezee said:
Nothing wrong there, thats how it works. A partition for each card.
Click to expand...

Hmm...This seems kind of ridiculous. What happens when you get past the Z: drive?
 
I believe it will only make 15 partitions maximum (15 x 4Gb = 60Gb).

Unless you have a lot of drive letters already (like 10 ) it shouldn't be a problem.
 
It depends on the OS. But the last time I had more than 26 drives it just continued with 'AA:', 'AB:' and so on.

I too find disk partitioning rather than working with directories an annoying and inconvenient design.

Here are my gripes:

1) I don't see the benefit of a 15-copy limit. I want to be able to grab a 500GB drive and just keep copying cards until its full. The effective limit with 4GB cards is 60GB and with 8GB cards is 120GB. Any larger disk is wasted space and can't be used.

2) I want to be able to use parts of my drive for other things -- for WAV files captured from my second sound unit for example. I'd love to be able to store those on my drive near or with my HVX captures. Maybe Scene Files.

3) I generally think that partitioning is a dangerous thing to do to a disk. I've seen bad partitions and so forth. Its a technology I am accustomed to using once or twice in the lifetime of a computer. Re-partitioning drives on a daily basis seems like a flakey approach to creating a directory structure and working with files. Sort of like using a sledge hammer to drive in screws... wrong tool for the job.

4) Why is there only firewire drive support and not USB drive support? USB drives are far more common than firewire drives, especially in mobile drives.

What happened here in the design?

It certainly would be helpful if someone with better insight could explain to us why this design was necessary or preferred. On the surface it seems like a very poor design choice.

Here are my guesses:

a) Hardware myopia. Maybe the designers thought "a P2 is like a disk", and carried the analogy too far. From a software perspective, the logical directory structure is the P2 "data object". The physical instantiation, whether on a PCMCIA card, hard disk, firestore, or whatever -- is (or should be) inconsequential.

b) Maybe they were worried about compatibility with file systems like NTFS, FAT32, HFS+, and so they went to the lowest common denominator -- partitioning. Although partitioning for compatability also seems like a poor decision.

c) Maybe the algorithms for working with file systems were patented and they couldn't get a license.

d) Maybe the algorithms for working with file systems were too large and there wasn't enough memory on board to support them.


"d" makes the most sense to me. Beause everything else on the camera is so well designed, the lousy disk support seems out of place.
 
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Yeah, pretty much everything you said.

It would be really nice if someone could write an application that gets rid of all the partitions and sticks all the files in different folders. Although, I'm not sure how that could happen unless it happened after you pluged in the USB/Firewire drive into your pc or mac.

I'm sure there is some sort of easy app out there that could take every drive and copy the contents to one folder automatically, just some sort of copying program. But then again that's not much different than just dragging and dropping all the contents.

I guess the site of 15+ different drives is a bit unsettling for a guy who is used to working with computers most of his life.



So if you have a huge USB of firewire harddrive, you can't use more than 120gb of it? I didn't know that.
 
Krunko said:
Yeah, pretty much everything you said.

It would be really nice if someone could write an application that gets rid of all the partitions and sticks all the files in different folders. Although, I'm not sure how that could happen unless it happened after you pluged in the USB/Firewire drive into your pc or mac.

I'm sure there is some sort of easy app out there that could take every drive and copy the contents to one folder automatically, just some sort of copying program. But then again that's not much different than just dragging and dropping all the contents.

I guess the site of 15+ different drives is a bit unsettling for a guy who is used to working with computers most of his life.



So if you have a huge USB of firewire harddrive, you can't use more than 120gb of it? I didn't know that.
Click to expand...
you need this
http://www.p2genie.com/
 
andy_starbuck said:
a) Hardware myopia. Maybe the designers thought "a P2 is like a disk", and carried the analogy too far. From a software perspective, the logical directory structure is the P2 "data object". The physical instantiation, whether on a PCMCIA card, hard disk, firestore, or whatever -- is (or should be) inconsequential.
Click to expand...

Or maybe most (or at least some) current file systems have a 2GB limit on the size of a single file?

Not defending mega-partitions, I also think its a dangerous operation to perform willy nilly. but file size limitations are very real.
 
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