External HD takes forever to be recognized

S

supremeone

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 17, 2007
Messages
141
I got this vantec enclosure and i'm using this old seagate barricuda 7200.7 drive. And I plug it in and everything, and it always recognizes sometime after like 40-60 minutes. Don't know how to make it recognize faster. I enabled the logical disk administer service but doesn't seem to do much.

My system is a7n8x-deluxe mobo. Other usb devices seem to work fine on it. No delays. So don't know exactly whats going on. I have the drive on cable select mode. It seems to startup and then stop a lot, also.

I also noticed one time I rebooted, it was instantly recognized then, with like no delay. But I usually turn it on while the computer has already started up.
 
This is a problem of the hard drive itself. It starts to work when something warms up to the certain temperature. Replace.
 
not sure bout this, but my external cases don't like having CableSelect, have you tried just using Master?
 
There's really hard drives that have to be a certain temperature to work? I don't know if that's it, but it's a weird problem nonetheless.

Anyways now it won't be recognized at all. Listened to it when it booted up and seems to make a kind of strange noise. So I guess it's dead. What happened was I was downloading something and kept getting these errors like unable to write or read from the server. And then when I went to my computer it froze a bit then when I clicked on the drive it froze again. So I turned it off. So I'm thinking it either got too hot or error on some file but. It's a slave drive so not sure why an error would mess it up so bad.

But anyways. This annoys me because I got this enclosure and was supposed to run cooler than a normal plastic enclosure atleast. I have 1 80 gig and 1 120 gig drives with plastic case and both are western digital. The one 80 gig lasted 1 year before I think overheating because was stressing it too much with transfers or copying/reading stuff. And 120 gig still works. But this 80 gig seagate drive, I put it in this supposingly cooler case and it's dead within a week. And I probably only used it for like less than 2 days in all. I know hard drives can be unpredictable but it's odd to me if the hd died because of overheating on this new enclosure, especially that fast ;\

I notice you can take the cover off these enclosures, would that make them run cooler instead of having the aluminum case over the top? Maybe if I do that it'll cool things down a notch. Also it's been like 80-90 degrees in my room so maybe that was a problem too ;\ But again plastic enclosure hd has been working fine although runs very hot too.
 
Prime suspect: master/slave/cable select jumper

Secondary suspect: faulty power supply/connector/etc on the external case

Third suspect: dead HD :(

Have you tried connecting the HD to your motherboard, and seeing if your BIOS recognizes it?
 
Servant of Shodan said:
Prime suspect: master/slave/cable select jumper

Secondary suspect: faulty power supply/connector/etc on the external case

Third suspect: dead HD :(

Have you tried connecting the HD to your motherboard, and seeing if your BIOS recognizes it?
Click to expand...


I don't know. Doubt it's a faulty powersupply or connector. I left it alone all the time. Just was d/l something and that's when it happened. Same thing kind of happened with another drive I had. I notice the more work the drive is doing, the hotter it gets and seems to mess things up.

I changed the jumper to single/master and no change.

So yeah guessing it's dead. Just seems odd to me if the cause was overheating since I'm using a more efficient case ;\ and was only 1 week. I bought this enclosure as a way to use my old spare harddrives as a way to backup my current harddrives. But if they keep dying within a week like that, it might be pointless.

Anyhoo, does it help to take the cover off an enclosure and give it some breathing room? Or does the aluminum cover of the enclosure work better?
 
I've never known an HD to go bad due to temperature while in an external enclosure - HD's do have a fairly high temp tollerance.

I really am in favor of something being wrong with the enclosure itself, so I would still see about testing your HD while connected to your primary power suppy and motherboard. Reason is, those enclosures can indeed fail. There's a dying one at my feet this very moment, and it is the power supply at fault - it keeps shutting off then turning on any hard disk I have connected...which is a bad thing. That can and does permanantly damage HD's.
 
wow seriously? That's not cool. How does that happen? Like that's not too uncommon for an enclosure to turn it on and off like that and then it can break?

Is it more common in only a few enclosures? Or this is just a bad one? ;\ This is pretty effed up. Should I try to get a return then?

But in this case it really does sound like that clicking noise of death. But could have also happened because of being turned on and off maybe I don't know. Anyway to really know? And what should I do now? ;x
 
Anyone? :( I have a 250 gig and a few 80 gigs I wanted to use for backup. But now I'm hesitant to do even that. Servant of Shodan says he has a failing enclosure too so now I'm thinking it's not too uncommon? So I should get a replacement?

And do you think it's a problem with this model or just a defective product? Because it always did seem like it was spinning up than slowing down and starting up again. And it'd end up taking 1hr to show up. It's either that or as someone else said, the drive needed to be a certain temperature to run, but that seems a little weird.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top