I had some hard drives that were working fine at the time that I sold them. The individual I sold them to had a 2.5" USB 2.0 Aluminum Serial ATA (SATA) Hard Drive Enclosure which he used to test the hard drives. He came back stating that one of the drives was not functioning correctly. I thought it odd, but I took his word for it and allowed him to test a few more drives before he left and he took 2 more that he was pleased with. Now he's contact me stating that the total of 3 drives he took failed a drive test. So I am probably going to refund him his money. However, I got to thinking that he was using the USB enclosure and just pulling the hard drives out and popping them in while the computer was on. Is it possible that doing this could have damaged the drives? Not once did I see him selecting "safely remove this hardware" so I'm suspicous as to why these drives would fail a test. Thank you for your responses.
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laptop drive, 2.5" external enclosure and USB
- Thread starter eaumana
- Start date
Question, did you TEST that drive he returned (directly attached to the mainboard's SATA/IDE ports)?
as some HDD enclosures are flaky and some will not work with all drives out there...
if he pulled the drive from the enclosure, then a definitive YES, it can damage the drive...
if he pulled the USB cable then there is a possibility that that occurred as well, depending on the OS, I've seen USB flashmedia and HDD's die when VISTA and Win7 where involved, though none while dealing with XP (but that does not preclude that such a damage could not incur)...
Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"
as some HDD enclosures are flaky and some will not work with all drives out there...
if he pulled the drive from the enclosure, then a definitive YES, it can damage the drive...
if he pulled the USB cable then there is a possibility that that occurred as well, depending on the OS, I've seen USB flashmedia and HDD's die when VISTA and Win7 where involved, though none while dealing with XP (but that does not preclude that such a damage could not incur)...
Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"
goombawaho
MIS
I would vote for bad hard drive enclosure causing the "failures". It would be hard to believe that the actual drives are failing or that one person could damage so many so fast!!
Some advice: buying/selling memory, hard drives, motherboards is a shaky thing at best. You can't sit there and fully test them with the buyer and seller present. It's like buying a used car - it looks good but may die on the way home.
Also, you can't control what the buyer is doing once they leave your site, so he could have damaged through incompetence. I would suggest a "no warranty once it leaves your site" policy.
The seller can't be a victim of the buyer's incompetence. But, more often it's the seller that knows that a drive is on its way out and sells it anyway. Been there, done that.
My rule is that I don't buy used stuff any more from private individuals. Ebay - at least you have some recourse. Craig's List - you're hosed.
Some advice: buying/selling memory, hard drives, motherboards is a shaky thing at best. You can't sit there and fully test them with the buyer and seller present. It's like buying a used car - it looks good but may die on the way home.
Also, you can't control what the buyer is doing once they leave your site, so he could have damaged through incompetence. I would suggest a "no warranty once it leaves your site" policy.
The seller can't be a victim of the buyer's incompetence. But, more often it's the seller that knows that a drive is on its way out and sells it anyway. Been there, done that.
My rule is that I don't buy used stuff any more from private individuals. Ebay - at least you have some recourse. Craig's List - you're hosed.
USB hard drive enclosures operate at the limits of USB power availability, unless they have a second USB connector for power sharing. Low power will lead to drive issues.
The "safely remove" process is to clear any pending writes to keep from corrupting things. If there are no pending writes there are no problems from disconnecting. There are settings that can be made to eliminate (for the most part) the possibility of corruption.
Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
The "safely remove" process is to clear any pending writes to keep from corrupting things. If there are no pending writes there are no problems from disconnecting. There are settings that can be made to eliminate (for the most part) the possibility of corruption.
Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.
I used one of those small enclosures for the first time the other day. But with the drive giving off quite a bit of heat, decided that it was a bad idea to trap all that heat in the enclosure. I then connected it to a 'sata/ide to usb 2.0 adapter' to do what I had to do.
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