Delayed Write Failed: USB 2.0 HD

I

iNViSiGOD

Gawd
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Apr 16, 2002
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Greetz fellow [H]'ers:

I've recently bought a new Maxtor 200GB HD and droped it into my external enclosure, well suddenly today it started giving me a "Delayed Write Failed" error and wont copy data, my PC then simply starts freezing up. I've checked the forums for this issue but none i found pretained to USB drives.

My system is as follows:

Dell Precision 650
Xeon 3.0ghz w/ HT
USB 2.0 compliant
 
Just curious, have you ever had the drive directly connected to your(or another) system. I've encountered a number of external USB enclosures that had some flakey USB interfaces that caused all sorts of problems, just a thought.

To make troubleshooting a little easier and eliminate a few potential causes of the problem I'd make sure there are no other USB devies connected and make sure your running the latest chipset/USB(or whatever is closest that Dell provides) drivers. After that, I'd probably start looking at the USB cable and then the drive itself as the likely culprits. If the cable is good, then I'd look(at)/contact Maxtor for any sort of hard drive analysis program and see what you can find.
 
I havent tried doing a direct connect yet, it just started out of nowhere the other day. I would try it except its on my work computer and that machine is Xerox owned. Could it be possible that it's mis reporting the available freespace?
 
That is interesting. If you can, I would try and run a CHKDSK on it. I've never owned a USB HDD, so I don't know if that is an option. It should be though. If all else fails, you could always RMA it! :D
 
In my experience, these are usually caused by incompatibilities. On the rare occasions that that isn't it, disabling "Write Caching" on the USB device is supposed to solve it. You can get to that through the drive's Properties page.

I also had one case where the problem was a USB2.0 device in a 1.0 (that's right, not 1.1) slot. Apparently they aren't backwards compatible that far. :eek:
 
Ok, this just gets stranger and stranger. I disabled write-caching and it didnt seem to help, but i noticed if I copy a file over 600 megs to the drive is when it wigs out, but if I copy a 200 meg file it seems to go over no problem.
 
I copied 160GB of 10-20GB DV clips to an external USB 2.0 Friday and left it running until I came in again Monday. It seemed fine until I went to access the external drive again and I started getting 'Delayed write failed' messages. I shut it down (since the copy process was already complete) and waited a few hours. Been running fine since. May have been a heat issue, although this model case does have a tiny fan.
 
Mine also has a tiny bay fan in it as well. I've let it sit overnight and brought it back into work today and it does it on my workstation as well as my secondary workstation, it just does not want to copy the files im trying to send over to it. If i try and force the issue it just locks up my workstation. Both the PC and USB enclosure are USB 2.0 compatible.

This is really starting to get frustrating. :mad:
 
Next test is to remove the drive from the enclosure and install it in the PC. If it works, you need to check your cables and/or replace the case.
 
Is it possible that windows is having issues recognizing the remaining space on the partition? I have it as one 180gig partition.
 
I've had 2 external USB/Firewire drive enclosures and they both went bad after a year or two...at times when I've had that "delayed write failure" error, XP's checkdisk would sometimes be able to fix the problem but and if it didn't FileScavenger 2.1 was the only hope of rescuing the data and then reformatting the drive.
 
kuyaglen said:
I've had 2 external USB/Firewire drive enclosures and they both went bad after a year or two...at times when I've had that "delayed write failure" error, XP's checkdisk would sometimes be able to fix the problem but and if it didn't FileScavenger 2.1 was the only hope of rescuing the data and then reformatting the drive.
Click to expand...

Damn thats wack, I just bought this thing about 2 months ago so it cant be dying already. I can still read the data and all that just fine, it's just acting pissy about moving data to it all of a sudden.
 
it should all be in incompatibilities with the usb or firewire interface chip. i've had nothing but problems on firewire and often usb with my metalgearbox with some old revision prolific controller. then i had another cheap enclosure with a i think oxford 911 or something like that chipset and i moved the same exact harddrive over and havent had a single problem. im rma'ing my metal gear box hoping i get a revC instead of the old revA.

check if you can upgrade the firmware it may help
 
ziddey said:
it should all be in incompatibilities with the usb or firewire interface chip. i've had nothing but problems on firewire and often usb with my metalgearbox with some old revision prolific controller. then i had another cheap enclosure with a i think oxford 911 or something like that chipset and i moved the same exact harddrive over and havent had a single problem. im rma'ing my metal gear box hoping i get a revC instead of the old revA.

check if you can upgrade the firmware it may help
Click to expand...
Quoted for truth.

To sum things up, Prolific makes a pretty bad controller, and you want to shoot for a Cypress AT2/Oxford 911 combo if you want both USB/1394. If not, you can find Cypress AT2 based enclosures out there.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=963881
 
wow thanks! and you probably know more about this than i do so here it goes: i'd like to use firewire with my hard drive since its hostless and much faster and my usb is otherwise cluttered with way too many devices (damn laptop..) so it's very poor for me to use that. i'm running in a generic enclosure which i'm guessing has to be oxford since it gets identified differently and works like a champ! i'm hoping that if i get a new metal gear box and it has the new revC prolific chip that i can flash up to the latest firmware that it should run just fine with firewire?

I had that patch that I found for max128k but it made performance very very bad and I'd rather not have to deal with workarounds.
 
From what I heard... you don't want to be running Firewire with the Prolific enclosures. They're better with USB, and even, they're not very good. Find out what controller your generic enclosure is using, you can likely see the name right on the circuit board.
 
Yeah, I'm a little short on funds right now so I'd like to make the best of what I already have. The good enclosure is unfortunately 5.25" and can't house the hard drive well. It's not really a problem, but it's not that portable and I'm using my hard drive in there instead of my dvd burner, which also, might I say, performed like an absolute champ with firewire. oxford is solid. i'm betting that's what it is. i'll take a look next time I have to do something to the enclosure.
 
Try removing all other USB devices from your computer. Also, there are a couple of MS KB articles on this very issue.
 
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