im not sure if its my USB ports that are going out or if its the hard drive. i traded a friend some audio gear i wasnt using for an unopened 1tb hard drive he had. everything seemed to be working ok… then out of the blue, all large downloads (bigger than 500 megs) would start to transfer, then for no reason the transfer would stall and chances are id have to unplug and replug the drive back in.
before the issue started happening, i was able to transfer a good 300 gigs to it. heres the kicker. i can transfer files OFF of the drive no problem and the transfer never hangs. in fact, it usually maintains a good 50mbps the entire time. now, i try and put new stuff on it and it hangs… so bad in fact that nothing works til i unplug it. i use google chrome for web surfing and if i try to surf while the issue is happening, i get ‘waiting for cache’ in the bottom left corner.
what gives? i wont miss the audio gear but i hope i didnt trade my stuff for a bad drive.
Yes, they quote a burst speed of 480 Mbit/sec (60 MByte/sec) but I’ve never seen sustained transfers above 30… I usually average around 20. This seems in line with both the USB specs for bus usage, and what others report (there have been several “how come I’m only getting 20MB/s from this??” posts).
So, it seems strange to me that you can get sustained speeds of 50.
It could be that something overheats with such sustained speeds and that’s why the device locks up. I have no idea.
■■■■ sorry about that. its a 1tb mybook essential.
its sustaining 41mbps right now. the last xfer i did held at 53. im transferring stuff off the drive, not on.
i called WD support, they advised to copy everything off the drive, delete the partition table, create a new one and write zeros to the entire drive. thankfully its under warranty and if an RMA is needed, itll only run me less than 10$ to ship it to em.
looks like the issue has been solved. heres what was done:
firmware updated
boot record and partition record deleted
new partition record created
drive zero’d out
vcd disabled
drive has copied a total of 10 ISO images so far, each 4.7gb in size. will confirm as solution once the other 300 gigs are transferred back to the drive.
doing a 177gig transfer atm, 20 files total. ive had 2 burps so far, as in the tranfer stalled for about 2 minutes then resumed. this is a big improvement over yesterday, where it would hang for hours and do nothing but lag my pc.
-edit-
so far so good. 251 gigs transferred today. it burped a few times at the end of each file (the large image files, 4.7gigs) but for the most part, it looks like the firmware upgrade, partition delete and zero out seems to have done the trick.
