USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Problems

[everest]

I put together an external harddrive using a Coolmax enclosure and a Maxtor 120GB drive. It was working fine before, but now the transfer rate has gone down significantly and sometimes freezes or stops in the middle of transferring large files. I'm just wondering if anyone has run across a similar problem?

I've tried it on two systems both running WinXP Pro with the same result. But, the two systems have the same USB 2.0 card. I'm not sure whether the problem lies in some software setting or with the hardware itself.

I think the chipset for the external enclosure is an Oxford chip and the hard drive is set to primary. I'm not sure if changing any hardware settings would help because it was working fine at the beginning. The drive is formatted to NTFS. Thank you for your help.

 

[flin898]

Man, my situation is worse than you.

I've got a USB2.0 enclosure as well. And I partition the HDD to 3 partitions, all got NTFS format. the first partition is ok. then the second partition and third one become problem. First of all, the second is not accessable. when I double click it, it ask me to format the partition. And the third one you can't even find it in the computer. Then I download a program called PARTITION MAGIC 8.0, can see the partition in it, and the second is still NTFS, but can't access in windows.
3 days ago, i plug the usb HDD in, computer pick up the HDD, but no partiton reconigse.. PQ magic says partition table error.

I'm definitely sure that's something wrong with the Maxtor HDD,I'll use my friend's seagate to test in a few days. I'll give u the update after I test it.


Cheers.

 

[mainegeek]

So..Did you format each partition after creation?

 

[mainegeek]

That question was for flin898.

 

[mainegeek]

everest, the drive may be running to hot or you may want to try it on a different port.

 

[rclarke250]

And you could take the drive out of the enclosure and see if hooking drive up directly shows any difference.