HD external USB long response time or freezing

Hello

My LACIE 250 GB external USB 2.0 drive takes long time to respond sometimes and sometimes the read/write lamp goes on and win XP doesn't respond for a while. I've had the error message "delayed writing failed" a couple of times but not anymore. My solution to freezing was to unplug the HD if the freezing time was long. I've tried another USB port and also verified that virtual memory and write caching are disabled. I've also performed a surface scan with no errors. Haven't found any specific diagnostic tools for the HD but did a Passmark seq read test with 10MB/s which sounds ok to me. The drive contains fragmented files mostly large ones (> 700 MB) and 6 GB is free (ca 2 GB when problem occured).

Please help

 

1. Do disk defragment on the LaCie drive using Windows or a disk defrag program. Too many fragmented files will slow down a drive.
2. Go to LaCie's support website and see if there are any driver or firmware upgrades. Not all external drives play nice with generic drivers.
3. After defragging, if the problem persists, try the drive on a different PC. If the problem repeats there may be an issue with the drive itself. Using a drive testing program (not "dskchk"), do a deep scan test.

I had a similar issue with a WD internal drive. Although "dskchk" gave it a clean bill of health, a deep scan with WD Data Lifeguard uncovered the truth.

 

Thanks for your reply

The disk has always been fragmented (maybe 40%) and Lacie web doesn't offer specific drives or tools for analyzing the disk. I would be very thankful for tips on programs for analyzing disks.

Regards Per

 

Disk is now defragmented
Original FAT = Backup FAT is verified by program

Problem persists!

Another error message (translated):
Unable to write data for file /Device/HardDiskVolume3

Sysinternals DiskView gave output: Unable to get volume info

Maybe it's some kind of "volume" problem?

Tried HD on computer with Vista (I run XP) and no freezup at initialization
but this doesn't always happen home either

Please help

 

Check out the drive analyzer software in MajorGeek's downloads section. Also, using Device Manager (CONTROL PANEL>SYSTEM), look at the LaCie device to see if it discloses the actual brand of the drive inside. I'm not sure about LaCie; however some external drive brands such as Iomega buy what's inside from the lowest bidder at the time (Toshiba, Seagate, Hitachi, etc.). If so, you can also go to the actual internal drive mfr's web site for a brand-specific diagnostic software suite (free).

Before you start testing the disk, make a backup copy of all its files on your PC's hard drive or another external drive. If the drive is on its last legs to begin with, the testing process may kill it (and your data) forever.

When you analyze the disk, use the deep scan options. It may take a few hours to complete the deep scan; however my experience is deep scans often catch issues quick scans don't.

 

Hi gman863.

I've forgot to mention that the disk starts and freezes a while when i try to open a file on another disk.

The brand is HITACHI but they don't offer diag tools/driver/firmware for my drive. The driver installed is a generic win driver. The name of the disk is HDT725025VLAT80 (Deskstar T7K500). I have performed deep scans with these programs availabe on majorgeeks drive utilities section - Victoria, Disk checker and HDDscan with no errors. However HDDscan produced a graph picturing read speed vs sector no and you can see a number of dips. I looked at the read times sampled and there were indeed intervals ranging a few thousand blocks with longer read times but not longer than 50 ms. There are three dips in the beginning and end of the disk and one in the middle. Normal read speed is 30000 KB/s and dips are 5000 KB/s.

:confused