External USB Hard drive not working properly

valve90210

valve90210

valve90210

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After a lot of thought, as detailed in this thread: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17564388, I have just purchased an IDE hard drive and an Icy Box enclosure.

The drive is a Western Digital 320gb, and the Icy Box is the USB 2.0 one.

I've put the drive in the case, and connected it up to my computer. It was recognised by windows, and after initialising it and formatting it to NTFS, I could see it in explorer etc.

I thought I'd do a few tests to see how quick it was for copying files as this will be used for my backups. In explorer it seemed reasonably fast, so I thought I'd go ahead and give my backup software a try (SyncBack SE).

The first thing I did was to get it back up some small files, for which it was fine. Then I got it back up my Photo folders, they contained about 5,600 files and were about 11.8gig in total. It started off fine but then when it got to a quicktime panorama which was about 108mb it ground to a halt, by that I mean, it stopped flashing and the file size remaining info in the software stopped going down. I also received a windows delayed write failed error message.

I thought thatmaybe it was because it was a largish file that it might have caused a problem, so I tried stopping the back up, which I could not do as the software had frozen. I launched Task Manager and got it to close the software. I then opened Explorer and tried to see how much had copied to the external drive, but the computer could not access it.

I tried using the safely remove software options but it just said that it could not be stopped at that time. In the end I had to turn it off at the power switch.

I restarted the computer and switch the external drive back on,windows again recognised it. I decided to try to copy a large file across to see if that was the problem, I tried in windows explorer and it was fine, an infact faster that I had thought it would be.

I then tried in SyncBack and it worked fine, so the file size couldn't have been the thing that caused a problem.

I tried doing another backup and again it started fine but after a short time, it ground to a halt againg, this time on a 1.4mb bmp file, again i got adelayed write failure message and could not access the drive at all.

I have looked at the setting for te drive and wondered if it might be becauseit was set to "optimised for hot swapping" or whatever the option is called I changed that to "optimised for performance" and tried again but te same thing happened, it gounrd to a halt.

Can anyone think of any settings that might cause this behaviour that I can try to change before I have to try to return the hard ware as not suitable, because, I can't run backups onto this drive with it malfunctioning in this way!!!

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give me

(sorry for the essay!!)

Valve
 
Just tried Allways Sync to back up the same folders and had exactly the same happen again, it started well, copying really quickly, then ground to a halt and stopped doing anything. and I eventually got a delayed write error.

Valve
 
Just been doing a bit of reading up the delayed write errors. According to Microsoft, this might be due to write caching being enabled on the drive. I'm not at home at the moment to check but does this sound like a plausible cause for the problems I am experiencing?

Valve
 
Problem Solved!!!

Delayed write failure error with USB2.0

After a bit of searching around on google, I discovered that the delayed write errors problem I was having with the external USB2.0 drive is a long standing and widely recognised problem, and is also found with Firewire drives.

I stumbled across this thread (http://forums.viaarena.com/messagev...d=50468&STARTPAGE=3&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear) on a VIA forum, which dates back to 2003 and is still running to this day with people who are experiencing the same problem, ie delayed write errors when writing to external USB2.0 or Firewire drives.

In amongst the thread there was some very useful information about various means by which people have managed to get round the problem. Also in the thread was a link to this site: (http://www.bustrace.com/delayedwrite/guestbook.php). The author of the page had done a lot of research into the problem and discovered what was causing it.

The problem has been recognised by Microsoft, they published an article about it on their support site at the late end of last year, this was revised early this year. The Article is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908673/en-us

The article mentions that they have a hotfix for this problem, however it is not fully tested yet so it is not available for download yet. To get hold of the hotfix you need to contact Microsoft directly.

Yesterday I contacted Microsoft and after a fairly lenghty phone call, I was emailed a link (free of charge) to download the hotfix, and a password for it.

I downloaded the fix, and ran it, restarted the computer and it seems the problems have gone. I didn't have time last night to do much testing but I did a few bits, including copying 6.4gb of video files, and copying about 2000 hi res photos, all went very smoothly indeed, not errors slowdowns or anything. I shall do some more testing and if all goes well I'll be very happy about using the drive for backing up!!!

Thought I'd post the links etc to help anyone else who might be having this problem

Valve
 
That's some useful info, thanks for sharing it.

However, over the last 2 years I've been using 4x2.5" HDDs and 3x3.5" HDDs, all in their own external USB2 cases, and have never had the "windows delayed write failed error".

I actually did see the error a couple of times on a PC years ago and that was on an internal IDE HDD or CD/DVD.

It could be a chipset problem though, I know you've got a fix now but if you get a chance try the drive and same tests on another PC/Laptop without the MS fix.
 
I've got a very similar problem except I'm connection to an ethernet drive (WD netcenter). Had it running for a couple of weeks and seemed to be ok but tonihgt while trying to load 150-ish photos into Adobe Photoshop album I've hit "delayed write failures".

Anyone seen any tips on how to sort this problem out for network drives?
 
deshepherd said:
I've got a very similar problem except I'm connection to an ethernet drive (WD netcenter). Had it running for a couple of weeks and seemed to be ok but tonihgt while trying to load 150-ish photos into Adobe Photoshop album I've hit "delayed write failures".

Anyone seen any tips on how to sort this problem out for network drives?
Click to expand...

Have you done anything to 'tweak' TCP connections? I noticed when setting up my Gigabit LAN that after setting so-called 'optimal' parameters (using TweakXP4) I got a lot of delayed write failures. I re-set to default values and the problem went away.
 
looking good ... just switched one PC back to default TCP settings and Photoshop album is now a lot faster ... previously if I scrolled down through the picture history fast it would take a few seconds for all the thumbnails to reappear ... now its back to near instantaneous as was the case when I was using an elderly PC as a "server" before I decided to invest in a netcenter as a "more reliable" (and quieter) alternative.
 
Spoke too soon .... seemed ok till I started to rotate some newly input photos to correct orientation, photoshop album "hung" then emitted the dreaded "delayed write failure ... you data has been lost" message.
 
aha ... may have found the cause. happened to notice that one of the ports on my router/switch was showing different pattern of lights to the others ... and it was the one that the netcenter was plugged into. Looking at the manual then showed that port was not running in full duplex mode which doesn't really sound what we wanted (its a direct device to switch connection after all)! Switched it to a different port, full duplex mode light stays on constantly and maybe its ok now as I just fired up photoshop album, selected a bunch of around 15 photos to rotate by 90degress and it went off and did it ok.

Hmm, now I think about it the port that the netcenter was plugged into was the one I was plugging my work PC into for remote logins and I always got very variable connections on that - I'd always put that down to a rather dodgy connector between ethernet cable and the laptops PCMCIA ether card ... maybe it was the switch all along!

(Lets hope I don't need to add another - "its gone wrong again" post tomorrow!)
 
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