Need Help With External USB Drive

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chuckerants

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Oct 14, 2006
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Phoenix, AZ
I have an older Dell Optiplex GX240 with Win Xp Pro with less then 1 gb of RAM. I keep filling up the 160 gb HD so I decided to buy a 750GB SATA drive. Since it does not have a SATA interface, I bought one of these:

EN391-S2-unit.jpg


http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=EN391-S2

I use it using a USB cable.

The problem that I'm having is that the computer keeps losing the drive. For example, right in the middle of copying a large file, the drive is no longer accessible by Windows. It's as if I turned the usb drive off.

I tried this drive on my Dell Inspiron E1505 with Vista Ultimate and it does the same thing, but I get a different message.

The BIOS is updated on the Dell desktop and I changed the drive letter to one that is never used. I also unplugged every other USB device on the desktop and it does the same thing.

Also, the laptop has no other device except for a USB mouse.

What's going on???
 
I'd have to *bet* that the issue is with the device. Two things lead me to this speculation:

1) Windows does not need a SATA driver or anything for this device: It needs only it's USB driver.

2) I have has similar devices in the past that have failed.

Before investigating the possibility of the device failing any further, though, I'd double check to make certain that the jumper on the hard drive itself is set to "Master", as some of these devices mandate it.

Also, make sure you have the drive formatted NTFS. Sometimes, if a drive if formatted FAT32 and you start throwing files at it larger than 4GB, the filesystem starts to flip out.
 
I'm not that familiar with SATA drives, but I don't think they have the IDE Master/Slave type pins.

sata.gif

Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I'd have to *bet* that the issue is with the device. Two things lead me to this speculation:

1) Windows does not need a SATA driver or anything for this device: It needs only it's USB driver.

2) I have has similar devices in the past that have failed.

Before investigating the possibility of the device failing any further, though, I'd double check to make certain that the jumper on the hard drive itself is set to "Master", as some of these devices mandate it.

Also, make sure you have the drive formatted NTFS. Sometimes, if a drive if formatted FAT32 and you start throwing files at it larger than 4GB, the filesystem starts to flip out.
 
Originally Posted By: chuckerants
I'm not that familiar with SATA drives, but I don't think they have the IDE Master/Slave type pins.


D'oh! The "S" in SATA stands for "Serial". My bad. My bad.

I'm kind of embarrassed: Now everyone knows that I am still using PATA drives!
blush.gif
 
Try using TeraCopy 2.0 beta 4 to copy the data to your new drive. It handles errors better.

The other thing is that it might be a USB bus timeout or voltage issue that you can't get around. A PCI card with 4 USB ports can be had for under $20 w/shipping from NewEgg.
This might solve your problem if it's either of these deeper system issues

$9.99 + shipping, 5 star rating.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124008
 
I've tried the USB port on the MB as well as the USB 2.0 PCI card that I have on the computer. I've even tried a USB 4 port external powered hub and they all did the same thing.

I'll try the TeraCopy and report back. Also, the drive was formatted in NTFS from when I starting using it.

Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Try using TeraCopy 2.0 beta 4 to copy the data to your new drive. It handles errors better.

The other thing is that it might be a USB bus timeout or voltage issue that you can't get around. A PCI card with 4 USB ports can be had for under $20 w/shipping from NewEgg.
This might solve your problem if it's either of these deeper system issues

$9.99 + shipping, 5 star rating.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124008
 
Well, TeraCopy did a whole lot better than Windows Explorer, but 7 GB into a 14 GB copy/move, TC got a Drive Not Found error and just stopped.
frown.gif
 
Now that's a great idea. I wonder if I even have a place to physically install the drive internally. Hmm.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Originally Posted By: brianl703
Why not get a sata interface card for $12 and install the drive internally?

I really don't like the idea of a hard drive being exposed like that, given how fragile they are.
 
My gut feeling told me that this device is having power issue or the design of the USB to SATA converter internally, or its firmware, is not designed right to handle near full speed large volume transfer for a long time.

There are things that high quality high performance device tests for, like writing in large random quantity of data and read back for verification, writing misaligned sectors, in reverse order, race conditions between 2 conflicting stream, etc. that smaller guys with low cost solution doesn't always do. These low cost solution work fine for 90-95% of the time but once in a while may cause deadly problem.

I am not worried about naming name, and can give you an example about a generation of IDE to CF connector from Syba that is wired wrong, that causes HDMA problems to some motherboard using it to boot a CF card. People were scratching their heads (including me in a lab) until someone found it and post it on the internet. The card cost only $10, but we end up having a down time of 2 days and an hour of our technician time to rewire it.

Also one of the most common chipset that is used for those 6, 14, 21 in 1 USB card reader is actually not meeting the official spec, and causes intermittent transfer issues and in some cases data corruption. This is used in not just low cost no name brand, but some name brand devices have this chipset as well. We didn't find it until we are stress testing our card in some worst case test scripts our paranoid Israeli engineers developed for us.

I'm going to bet $10 on the power issue, and another $10 on the chipset design issue.
 
Panda - What I know of the USB bus is that it does take power from the MB, or the PC itself. This is why I tried the external powered USB hub. But it seems the external HD device itslef may be the problem.

Teracopy does seem to help, but even with TC the HD/External combo I have just does not work.

I think I may be getting that PCI SATA device as it is the cheapest solution.

PS
I just bought 2 Sandisk MicroSD cards. :)
 
chuckerant, nothing in software can help you on this if the power occasionally dip below spec (aka brown out). Hard drive, even the 2.5" one, is a high power device that cannot be powered by USB. USB spec says 500ma for a high power device and some put out only 100ma for low power ports for keyboard/mouse, etc.

This device does have an external power supply, how much current does it put out? What is said on your hard drive? Does the current of the 12V and 5V combine exceed the ones your power supply of the adapter shows?

The best way to rule out the power issue is to try the hard drive in your PC and see how good is it.

The most reliable method I can recommend to you is to use one of those SATA to PATA/IDE converter card. It has the connectors that switch the old style power connector to the SATA power connector, this is something that a PCI SATA card can't do. If it still doesn't work, then it is the PC or the hard drive.

Thanks for the purchase!!
 
Also for SATA to IDE converter, Marvell makes the best low cost chipset for the moment, and they are in a lot of Promise cards. I know Maxtor used to buy a bunch of them and slap them on the hard drive's PCB and sell their older PATA drives as SATA, so they can't be too bad.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear

The most reliable method I can recommend to you is to use one of those SATA to PATA/IDE converter card.


I've tested a few of those and I'm not very happy with their quality or the fact that they either don't support master/slave (they come hardwired as master) or they won't work with another drive on the same IDE cable making the presence of the master/slave jumper useless.

Quote:
It has the connectors that switch the old style power connector to the SATA power connector, this is something that a PCI SATA card can't do.


The same place has the power adaptor for $1.27
 
SATA only support one device at a time, so it must be set as master. That's the spec, not the fault of the IDE/SATA converter chip.

That's why you see 2x as many SATA connector on a typical setup as IDE/PATA.
 
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