external usb hardrive

[Chuck Stewart]

I recently purchased two external drives for file storage and backup, a Fantom for the wifes laptop and an Iomega for my desktop,both usb drives.I run XP Pro and she runs Vista and we both share broadband connection. Both drives worked fine right out of the box and still do except for one issue that although minor and I can live with still bugs the heck out of me. Very often when trying to download something directly to the disk I'll get a "write disk failure". I know that you can set your disk preferences to either "optimize for performance" where it writes to the windows cache or "set for easy removal" where it's not supposed to use disk cache and you don't have to click the remove safely icon. Seems it doesn't matter which mode it's in I still receive the error message. I checked the allocated space Windows was using for disk cache and upped them both to maximum recomended but still no luck. Yes I know, just download to the main drive and then move it on over which is what I'm doing but still, what the heck. Only thing I can think of is a sync issue between the speed of my broadband and the drive and that's it's having to start and stop too many times to "wait" for the download that it's declaring surrender. Any ideas out there?

[Mike Gager]

every once in awhile ill get something like that while trying to move or download something to the external drive. it stops working and i get a similar error and then i cant find the drive in explorer. i have to unplug the ext drive power and usb and then plug it back in for it to work again. dont know what causes it

ive heard the "its ok to remove" button is just there for people who are afraid unplugging a usb will hurt something and really has no effect on anything

[Eric DeSilva]

"its ok to remove" button is just there for people who are afraid unplugging a usb will hurt something and really has no effect on anything

Oooh. No--some writes are cached for speed. The OK to remove button flushes the buffer and makes sure everyone is written. Some devices survive being yanked out OK, and it may work if the buffer has naturally flushed, but I wouldn't recommend the practice.

[Mike Gager]

yeah looks like you are right. however i checked and my usb drives are set up for quick removal so i guess im ok

i read that about the usb thing years ago and i dont think i have ever clicked the safely remove hardware icon

[Steve knight]

how big is the file? when I bought my first name brand external drive it was formatted fat 32. that limited the size of the file it can have. not sure what size but it is a round 1 gig. I was getting the same message trying to copy files to it. the solution is to reformat the drive to ntfs. it is a better choice anyway.

[Chuck Stewart]

Steve, the Iomega came out of the box with NTFS but the Fantom I had to reformat before I put anything on it. Your right about it being the large files it's having trouble with but now that I've given it more thought it's not just downloads becuse once in awhile I'll convert mp4 movies (wifes Ipod) to my Zunes wmv and try an on the fly write to the disk and it fails. But if I switch the folder to something on my internal main drive it works. Maybe I'll try turning off Zonealarm next time i convert and see what happens....it seems to have to check everything and that may be conflicting. Can't do that on a download though lest I install a backup virus program.

[Steve knight]

very strange it should just act like a internal hard drive. one thing to try switch drives between the computers and try coping the same files on each machine and see if the problem stays with the drive or the computer.