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External Harddrive Problems....

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kfitting:
After reading mouser's review a long time ago I decided that I wanted to get an external enclosure and harddrive to make my own external drive.  Just yesterday I recieved my enclosure (USB 2.0) and Western Digital (80gig, 8mb cache, 7200 rpm Caviar) harddrive in the mail.  I plugged it in and copied ~8gig in half an hour.  All was going smooth... until I tried reading from the drive.  I got an I/O error.  After further playing around there are certain files that cause the I/O error, but ONLY on reading from the drive! To make things weirder, while I'm attempting to read the file that gives the I/O problem, I can read and write other files.  I get most of my problems trying to open avi files from the external harddrive.  If I copy them to my internal harddrive they play no problem.  I set the external drive to master, but what is the internal drive supposed to be set to?  Other than this setting, I dont think I have a hardware problem.  Is there some software setting I could tweak?  Any ideas?   If you need more info, let me know.

Kevin

mouser:
i can give comment a little though i don't have a perfect solution.

first, your setup sounds good.
the only troubles i have ever had with external hard drives were when using drives > 160gb.
you are using usb2 and a reasonable hard drive so you should NOT be having any troubles.
and i have used quite a few no name enclosures and lots of different hard drives, and i've not had any troubles, so what you are experiencing is not normal.

setting external drive to master sounds right - and it really should not matter what your internal drives i don't think.

the ideal thing would be if you could test the hard drive inside your computer to identify whether the issue is with the hard drive or enclosure; that would be my first recommendation to try if you can.

i happen to have a spare usb enclosure, i could send it to you to test if you send it back afterwards.
but again the easiest first test might be to install the hd internally and see if the problems persist.

maybe someone has better familiarity with hds can help more.

don't give up, i love my external hd - it's a joy to have.

nudone:
master is the correct setting.

might sound daft but is the external drive recognised as a usb 2 device, i know you'll encounter problems if it's only working as a usb 1 device.

as for your video files, well, the bandwidth might not be up to it if you are trying to play certain types. can't honestly remember now but i know i've had random problems with things like that (might have been DV).

could it be that the external drive is losing connection? you might find plugging it into another port will help. again, i can't fully remember but i know i had to mess around trying all combinations to get a few external drives working - on other occasions they just work no matter how you plug them in.

i definitely try mouser's suggestion of sticking the hard drive into your machine - internally. also definitely try plugging it into different usb ports.

if you are using a usb hub try excluding that. and if you aren't using one then try one with it's own power supply.

i don't really know any technical solutions other than just trying to mix and match. probably a good idea to try the external drive on someone else's machine if you can.

kfitting:
Some decent suggestions... the only problem is I'm using a laptop.  I may be able to try sticking the drive in the old desktop I havent used in a while.  nudone, your point about the video is a good one especially since avi's give the most trouble.  wmv and mpeg work.  The only problem is that once I get the I/O error on a file it's corrupt and I have to delete it (it does delete fine so maybe it's not corrupt, I dont know).  Honestly I can live with not playing video files from the drive, I'm just concerned that I wont know which files wont until it's too late!

mouser, yes, I heartily agree that the external drives are sweet.  I'm trying everything I can with this one... the fact that it works most of the time gives me hope!  I'll keep your offer in mind, though at ~$18 a pop, buying a new enclosure isnt out of the question (especially since I will probably expand to multiple external drive backups at some point anyway).  Thanks, and any more ideas are welcome.  If I get time tonight I'll try some different configs.  Oh, and the USB 2 thing... I'm assuming it's recognizing as USB 2 due to the speed involved, however, where would I be certain of that?  In device manager?  Thanks,

Kevin

mouser:
here's a question:
are you saying that you can copy the file from the external drive to internal, and it works,
and the only trouble is if you *play* it from the external drive then you get the error?

or do you get errors trying to read those files on the external drive no matter what, whether playing or copying.

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