File system errors when using eSATA with MyBook Home

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi!

In short:

using the drive via eSATA seems to generate file system errors while using it with USB doesn’t.

The whole story:

I own 1TB MyBook Home edition with USB/FW/eSATA formatted in NTFS. I use WinXp SP3. Integrated eSATA controller on my motherboard is JMB 363. I use the latest drivers for it and also the drive itself has the latest firmware. Motherboard is an NForce 750i based MSI P7N SLI Platinum.

The problem is that when I connect the drive via eSATA cable, it seems to work just fine, but if I run chkdsk, it fails more often than it doesn’t (i.e. it often says that “windows was unable to complete the disk check”, but sometimes it passes with no errors). If I than reconnect the drive via USB and run chkdsk again (with a tick to fix file system errors), it completes successfully and produces no errors thereafter (until I reconnect the drive via eSATA cable). Fixing file system errors results in a loss of names for some files (they are shortened to 8 symbols), but so far data remains intact. Of course, file system errors when using eSATA don’t make me happy. Any ideas about faulty eSATA connection? Thanks in advance.

2

You asked in another thread if you are the only “lucky one” with this problem.

I don’t have that problem and I’m running a Dell Inspiron 530 with Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R SATA RAID Controller driver in AHCI mode so that I can hot swap. 

If the drive doesn’t go to sleep (and most times even if it does), my data is fine. The only time it hasn’t been was when the physical drive was failing, which I didn’t know soon enough because they don’t publish SMART data through the eSATA connection.

3

Thanks for your reply. So it seems that my problem most probably resides in JMB controller or its driver or maybe MB’s bios as I don’t have the most up-to-date one. SMART data doesn’t show any problems with the drive, so I hope it is not failing. What’s really bad is that I have hundreds of gbs of data on the drive, which makes me somewhat reluctant to experiment with it.

So far esata experience was not a pleasant one for me and I really regret not waiting for another year for USB 3.0 enabled drives.