Anyone know anything about external hard drive enclosures?

Factual Questions
1

I have an IOMagic usb 2.0 external hard drive enclosure. I’ll go on at length some other time about how great it is, but trust me, it’s awesome.

It worked great until a few days ago. I started having a problem. It manifested itself to Windows XP as “Delayed Write Failure”. For some reason the system could not write a file called $mft to the drive.

I spent a lot of time googling that and things derived from it, like “hard drive cache”. I didn’t find anything that looked too useful for my particular problem.

Then I noticed that the power light was going out on the enclosure whenever this error message popped up. And that the drive became inaccessible when this happened, although XP seemed to think it was still there, just unreadable.

I could temporarily fix the problem by flicking the power switch on the enclosure off and then back on again, kind of rebooting just the drive. The drive would become accessible again. But the problem always came back.

Ok, I thought. Something’s wrong with the enclosure. Got another one. Set it up with the same drive. Worked fine for about a day, then, same problem.

Ok, I thought. I have a bad drive. So I set up a new drive in the old enclosure. Worked fine for about a day, then, same problem.

At some point in there I also got the idea that heat buildup might be causing the problem. In the normal course of running it I could feel the aluminum surface of the enclosure get fairly hot. So I set up a box fan right next to the enclosure, which kept it completely cool to the touch.

Once again (sigh), it worked fine for about a day, then, same problem.

I’m now down to my last trick. When I set up the second enclosure I was too lazy to also replace the power cord and usb cable that came with the old one. So at the moment I have:

  • New drive

  • Running in a new enclosure

  • With new power cable and usb cable

  • With the box fan blowing right at it
    If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do next. Could it have been a problem with the old power cord? The only other time the light goes out is when I turn off the power switch or disconnect the power cord.

On the other hand, when this stuff happened I heard noises that sound like “bad drive” to me. Is it possible I just got two bad drives in a row? They’re both Maxtors, they’re supposed to be pretty good, right?

2

I have had some issues with the power supply of the USB alone being insufficient to run the drive (in this case a laptop drive in an external enclosure.

Does the power supply plug into another USB port, or is it plugged into a wall jack?

What you’re describing sounds to this layman like the drive is not getting enough power and the connection is intermittent because of that. If the power cord is plugged into the wall, maybe the power cord is bad (probably unlikely). If it’s plugged into a USB port, you need to make sure it’s on a separate bus if possible, USB power is per-bus, not per jack (a helpful tidbit I picked up on this very forum a few weeks ago).

3

Similar to what stolichnaya said, I think it’s a USB power issue. Try a different host port on your machine, and if that doesn’t work, try a different PC.

4

Could also be a problem with the driver for the enclosure (the USB interface). You can uninstall and reinstall that from the device manager, only takes a minute. I was also going to suggest a chkdsk on the drive but you said it’s a new physical hard drive.

5

FWIW, I have a different model external drive enclosure. The exact same crap happened with my firewire connection. I thought it was the hard drive dying but when i use USB everything is fine. So it seemed the firewire controller took a dump. I hate hard drives and everything associated with them. :frowning:

6

Have you tried the enclosure with a different USB cable? Different port on the PC?

7

Both of the enclosures I used were of the exact same model, that I linked to in the OP. It has a seperate USB and power cable. Power cable plugs directly into the wall outlet (power strip, in my case).

I haven’t tried another USB port. I might yet, but the latest configuration is still working, though not with nearly the kind of load I’ve put on it before…I haven’t tried to download ~30 Gb to it overnight.

I’m starting to wonder if maybe the problem was heat after all, but not in the drive, in the power cord. The enclosure actually doesn’t actually plug directly into an outlet. It plugs into a square thingy…there’s a technical term for it I’m sure, but I don’t know what it is.

Then the thingy plugs into the outlet. And when the drive is in use, it gets hot. And I am guilty of having kept it in a place where it doesn’t have much opportunity to dissipate heat.

Could that have been the problem?