way2fast

ive got a nextsar external drive sith a samsung laptop drive in it, and ever since my laptop gave me troubles of turning on and off repeatedly my drive has been randomly loosing data with a need to run chkdsk just to be able to use it again. I run the drive with just the usb power and use the "safely Remove hardware" icon. could my drive be going bad or is it possible that the directory structure is bad and the drive needs to be reformated.

oh and the drive is only about 6 weeks old. thanks

Done_Fishin

when using usb drives you need to be careful about the write caching.. normally I belive it should be disabled since when you get a sudden switch off whatever was in the cache gets lost. That's why powering off can take some time too, windows is writing everything that is in the cache to disk as a housekeeping task. I have noticed that my USB drive doesn't show up in the safely remove hardware when I boot up with the uSB connected at power on. I suspect it might be treating the drive as "normal"

way2fast

so can cache writing be disable for just the portable drive or does it get turned off for the opperating system. and how do i turn it off?

Done_Fishin

You can turn it off for just the hard drive. Right Click on any hard drive and choose properties / hardware. Look down the list of drives until you see your drive. Click on it and select properties, another window will open. Select policies.
It should show you 2 options, optimize for quick removal and optimize for safe removal. Quick removal appears to slow down the writing of large files to disk but it writes eveything immeditely. The other option caches info going to the disk hence the requirement to force it to finish when aplying" safely remove this item" from the task bar.

Done_Fishin

if you check against another fixed drive you also gret a third option and a warning!
I think it is clear.
it says (approximately)
Enable write caching on this disk
this setting improves performance on this disk but a power outage or equipment failure might result in loss of data or corruption ..

way2fast

Thanks Done_Fishin. It sounds like that should help prevent future loss. is it possible that some of the data is corrupt from a bad directory. When i try to access some of my music i get an error saying "inable to access memory block" or somethng along those lines, but i'm still able to transfer the files through explorer, just cant get them to burn, same for some of my movies on the drive. any thoughts?

Done_Fishin

the only thoughtb that comes to mind is to do a checkdisk / scandisk from the tools in the drive properties. If you select both checks in the box , it may/will offer to let you check next time you boot. That might apply only to boot drive though. let it do the test or run when you next boot. It will do a check if you don't ask to scan for and recover bad sectors, so you could try twice. Once without and then again with the boxes checked.

dmitryk

I would suggest to check cable as well and may be add separate power supply to external box if you use USB port for power too.

way2fast

ok, so with running it powered just from the usb if it doesn't get enough power what would that do to the drive?

Done_Fishin

If you don't have sufficient power, your drive might not work, it might work but not properly ..

If your drive is able to take as much power as it wants from the USB port, but the USB port wasn't designed for that power conusumption, it is possible to damage the USB port and / or motherboard.
I have a USB 2.5" adapter which I yet have to check out because specs for USB 2.0 say 150mA, whilst the drive says 700mA.
I have had reassurances though that using the split cable with extra "dummy" USB connector gives more than enough current to let the USB drive work. Since the drive is sitting inside my laptop and I haven't had time to remove it and check it out .. I am still on standby.
Some motherboards do warn that the USB connectors which are on-board are current limited whilst others connected to pins on the mainboard and require USB harnesses or front panel cables & connectors are not protected.
I would refer to your motherboard manual to see what type you have and what you are using. There was a high power version of the USB port ... but that is as far as my research has taken me so far.