Problems with external hard drives

[Dave2002]

I'll have to wait to review your suggestions.

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I look forward to them later - though I was initially surprised at what appeared, as you can imagine. Now it's also telling me that my speed is 0mph!

[MrGongGong]

I'll have to wait to review your suggestions.

I look forward to them later - though I was initially surprised at what appeared, as you can imagine.

That's a frequent pain for me as well.
Hope you get there in time to vote though

[Dave2002]

That's a frequent pain for me as well.
Hope you get there in time to vote though

Sorry, I'm not registered to vote - which is perhaps a shame. I only have a fraction of Scottish blood in me - and until a few years ago when I discovered that my great grandmother was Scottish I thought I had virtually none, though close relatives have more. Now I'm confused anyway - as I do kinda admire the two fingers to Westminster approach. Will have to wait until tomorrow to see how it pans out.

[johnb]

David,

I am by no means a computer expert so I can only say what I would do in your situation:

(1) Presumably my first move should be to acquire a powered hub, and to see whether with this the problem files reappear?

This would most definitely be what I would do first. Your bad experience with a number of external HDDs suggests that the USB power is the thing to check first. It might not be the solution but at the very least you will have eliminated the USB power supply as being the cause of the problem.

You should be able to get a powered USB hub very easily - they are widely available.

(2) If they don't, do you think the drive is rescuable? In other words, might the lack of adequate power in some way have damaged it? Should I discard it and buy a new one?

My guess is that it is unlikely that inadequate power will have damaged the HDD, though if there has been a power problem while files were being written to the HDD those particular files are likely to be corrupted.

After getting a powered USB hub, the next thing I would do is to check the affected HDDs. If there is any doubt what-so-ever about the adequacy of the USB power supply I would only do these checks when the external HDD was connected via a powered hub or by a mains adaptor.

There are various programs to check HDDs without harming the files. Some HDD manufacturers have there own HDD checking software which can be downloaded from their websites. Some of these rely on the HDDs own firmware to run the checks and will also report the SMART parameters. (SMART is a system by which modern HDDs self log a range of events.)

The most readily available software to check HDDs is part of Windows 7 (other versions of Windows will have the equivalent). As far as I know it doesn't use the built in checking firmware of the HDDs - for that you would need other software.

Open Windows Explorer
Click on "Computer" in the left hand panel
Right click on the drive you want to check and select "Properties"
Select the "Tools" tab
Click on the Error-checking Check "Now button"
Check both of the options and click Start.
Warning: this can take many hours to run and you might have to restart your computer at the beginning.

Do not shut down your computer while the checks are running.

(3) Or might this one be alright (with a powered hub) if I delete all the data and start again (or perhaps reformat and start again)?

Do the HDD checks first, as per (2), then you will be in a better position to decide.

(4) If I am copying from hard drive A to hard drive B, would it be ok to attach the two drives to a single powered hub?

You should be OK with that.

Good luck and ask if there is anything else you are unsure about.

[mangerton]

Most interesting, johnb, thanks. I have a Samsung external HD with a back up of all my personal files. It's connected by USB. I also have my family tree info - the work of more than 20 plus years backed up on the memory card in my mobile phone, and on Dropbox.

When miss m was doing her Univ dissertation seven years ago, she had a copy on her laptop, there was a copy on her Univ drive, and her mum and I both had copies on our computers. I am pleased to say all went well.

[MrGongGong]

When miss m was doing her Univ dissertation seven years ago, she had a copy on her laptop, there was a copy on her Univ drive, and her mum and I both had copies on our computers. I am pleased to say all went well.

Not long after my daughter went away to university I got a call at 2:30 am
"Daaaaad, you know about Sibelius and computers?"
"Yes"
"I'm in the studio and I think it's crashed and lost my composition"
"Ok, where did you back it up ?"
"erm, I was running everything on a memory stick"
"aaaah, I think it's gone then"
"can't you fix it?"
"erm NO, i'm 400 miles away"

and so on

Only happened once though

Was it Michael Berkley who left his opera on a train ?

"

[cloughie]

I had two HDDs die on me - I think it may have been a temperature problem as I kept them permanently connected to the PC. I now have a third one which, so far so good - I only plug it in to do back up as needed.

[mangerton]

Not long after my daughter went away to university I got a call at 2:30 am
"Daaaaad, you know about Sibelius and computers?"

Oh yes. I know that "Daaaaad". I got it once at 10.30 on a Sunday evening when miss m was at Durham.

"Daaaaad, there's a spider in the bath."

"And?"

There then followed instructions involving a sheet of paper and a glass. Twenty minutes later, "Dad, I was soooo brave....."

Quite different from the "Daaad", when you make a remark that your daughter feels would have been better left unsaid.

[Frances_iom]

It is quite likely that one (or more) of your machines cannot provide the required power for the hard drive - as John suggests always use a powered hub (or better still extract the harddrive and unstall in a spare machine - you can obtain removeable bays to take SATA drives from maplin but I wouldn't quite trust then to switch off hdd whilst the processor is still powered unless you first ensure all data fully synced (easy with Linux - suspect more of a hassle with windoze) - then remove racked harddrive and place in a safe place eg take it home from the office if you are a small company - if the hdd was underpowered whilst writing you may well have corrupted a key part of the file system - this could range from FAT, NTFS (Windoze) or some Mac special - FAT are usually rescueable as long as you dont try any further writes post failure but errors in the allocation table will give file corruption

[Bryn]

I have a number of USB powered 2.5" external drives, including Toshibas of 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. Using the power from ACER Aspire 5740's USB2 slots I find that the 2TB drive struggles, clicks and clacks if another external USB hard drive plugged into one of the other USB slots. On its own, it is fine and runs both smoothly and with quite acceptable speed. I have had more dead WD drives than those from any other manufacturer. That may, of course, just be a case of bad luck.

[Frances_iom]

few laptops provide enough power to support several hdds whose combined power requirents esp at spin up (and tho less so on writes) can be quite high - on some cheaper machines you can easily fry the USB controller by excessive power demand tho there is supposed to be a current limiter in the USB drive chip (don't forget if you are using low cost laptops specially designed for a well known large chain that these have the lowest cost components obtainable from random chinese manaufacturers - I prefer to set up a NAS and pipe the backup over a local Lan - maybe not as fast as a USB3 but certainly comparable to USB2 - I use a couple of 3.5"" 1TB as backups and switch then on only for the backup then off when backup complete

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

My problem is having so much stuff backed up from so many computers that I can't find much of it without wasting a great deal of time. Only the Sibelius files on my beloved Acorn computer, that has outlived several PCs and a MacBook, are fully accessible. But there's no USB socket for this so everything has to be backed up via the CD drive.

[Hornspieler]

I have a Hitachi 1Terrabyte hard drive with usb connection to the mainframe which has proved totally reliable.

All the data from my two computers, plus thousands of photographs and all of my music recordings are backed up on this drive and it is still only half full. Invaluable also for transferring data from one computer to the other, so I not only have everything backed up on the hard drive, but "permanent data" such as lpeg and bitmap pictures is backed up in two places.

The Hitachi cost me around £60.00 from a local dealer and has been without problems since I bought it in 2009.

HS

BTW I defragment all of my hard drives at least once a month. That includes the Hitachi

I should have mentioned that the Hitachi is separately powered through a mains transformer input.
Only the data passes to and from the USB port.

HS (AKA The Horncat)

[Risorgimento]

Cautionary bit of advice. If you are thinking of upgrading to Mavericks and have been running WD software (which you actually didn't need to) with your external WD hard drive (MyBook et al) then you run the risk of data loss on this drive post-Mavericks update. It's the WD software that messes things up.

[David-G]

Is Mavericks an operating system of some sort? Presumably manual copying to or from the drive works alright?