WD USB passport drives

edgedemon · 5 Apr 2009 at 01:06

i have several of these, ranging from 120Gb upto 500Gb, and they all have the same problem. I can never copy large amounts of data in one go onto these drives. This morning I decided to copy 27gb of files onto one of these drives, and I managed to get 11gb before I got an error message telling me the drive was full and there wasnt enough room. This is strange as Vista reports that I have 37Gb free on this drive. plugged it into a linux laptop to check and I do have 37Gb free, so why the error message. I have run all the tests vista will let me and all have passed. I bought a dual usb lead, which did help as it doesn't happen all the time now but Im mystified (and quite annoyed) as to why this happening.
Anyone else have similar problems or know a solution?

FaceplantSi · 5 Apr 2009 at 08:06

afaik these drives are delivered FAT32 as default... have you re-formatted them to NTFS as that'd be the first thing I'd check.

SlyReaper · 5 Apr 2009 at 09:25

FAT32 drives have a transfer limit of 2^32 bytes = 4GB I believe. If you try to copy a larger file than that, you'll get an error somewhere along the way.

It will happily copy more than 4GB of data as long as no single file exceeds 4GB in size.

miniyazz · 5 Apr 2009 at 10:16

If it helped giving it a power boost with the dual USB lead, it might just be it's losing power part way through the operation. I've not had that problem with mine, and I'm only using the original USB cable, but try plugging the spare cable into a different USB controller. It seems logical to me that plugging it into a different port on the same controller might 'share' the power available between the two cables, so using a different controller for each might help.

edgedemon · 5 Apr 2009 at 11:51

miniyazz said:
If it helped giving it a power boost with the dual USB lead, it might just be it's losing power part way through the operation. I've not had that problem with mine, and I'm only using the original USB cable, but try plugging the spare cable into a different USB controller.

Good point I will give this a try...

SlyReaper said:
FAT32 drives have a transfer limit of 2^32 bytes = 4GB I believe. If you try to copy a larger file than that, you'll get an error somewhere along the way.

It will happily copy more than 4GB of data as long as no single file exceeds 4GB in size.

A couple of the drives are fat32 and 3 are NTFS, I will have a play later by dividing up the filetransfers to see if this is an issue..

Thx for all help, will report back and let you know..

Ben M · 5 Apr 2009 at 12:22

edgedemon, what's a dual USB lead?

miniyazz · 5 Apr 2009 at 12:54

Ben M said:
edgedemon, what's a dual USB lead?

It's basically an adapter for USB powered devices such as portable hard drives. Instead of having one USB plug into the computer, which handles data and power, it has two, one handling data and power and the other handling just power. If a normal USB cable looks like PC--HDD then it looks like PC=-HDD

Ben M · 5 Apr 2009 at 13:03

miniyazz said:
It's basically an adapter for USB powered devices such as portable hard drives. Instead of having one USB plug into the computer, which handles data and power, it has two, one handling data and power and the other handling just power. If a normal USB cable looks like PC--HDD then it looks like PC=-HDD

Oh, so that it is better powered? I getcha.

hc25036 · 5 Apr 2009 at 20:01

Also if you are plugging into a hub (even a powered one) try plugging into a system USB port instead. Mine only gets enough power that way...