Copying large files to USB external drive enclosure - Freezes

[Mark Minnie]

I have an Adaptec USB external drive enclosure with a WD 140GB drive.
XP freezes most of the time when I copy a large file to the external
drive (~1.4GB).

This is my second external drive enclosure. I bought an off brand that
did the same thing. I thought I would spend twice as much on a name
brand (ie. Adaptec) to solve the problem. No dice.

Any ideas on how to prevent the freezing?

I am running XP with service pack 2.

 

[Cymbal Man Freq.]

Don't put anything important on that external drive until this gets figured out.
Your external drive may become corrupted and unusable until a correct answer is
found. I've been looking for an answer for this for 6 weeks and no sufficient
answer has come up except that two Windows Update patches from mid-December 2005
have wrecked my USB 2.0 capability. Uninstalling those two patches doesn't seem
to be quite enough to right the system sufficiently, there must be residue from
those patches after uninstallation in the Control Panel.

My USB 2.0 external drive worked fine in early December last year, then in
mid-January I kept getting errors when copying large files. Some people have
complained that if they keep the size of the file down, say way under half a
gigabyte, then copying is no problem. That defeats the purpose of copying large
files. I'm trying to copy 1.99 GB files and I get Event 51 errors, among many
other types of errors. I don't feel inclined to copy 50 GB worth of stuff at USB
1.1 speed. My drive works fine on a Win 98SE machine at USB 2.0 speed, but not
on the WinXP Home machine at USB 2.0 speed.

Reformatting may be required if I keep using the drive on the Win XP machine,
and even then, reformatting may fail because of the same types of problems,
Event 51 errors; then I may end up with a corrupted and unformatable drive. So,
my drive isn't going back onto the Win XP machine until I find an appropriate
answer to this problem.

 

[Edward O'Brien]

Hi, Mark.

Have you tried talking to Adaptec?

Good luck,

Ed

 

[NoStop]

I have an Adaptec USB external drive enclosure with a WD 140GB drive.
XP freezes most of the time when I copy a large file to the external
drive (~1.4GB).

This is my second external drive enclosure. I bought an off brand that
did the same thing. I thought I would spend twice as much on a name
brand (ie. Adaptec) to solve the problem. No dice.

Any ideas on how to prevent the freezing?

I am running XP with service pack 2.

Wait for Fista to come out and maybe Microsoft will finally get USB2 working
properly. Or if you're impatient and have started to lose faith in
Microsoft ever getting anything right, take a look at an alternative o/s
like GNU/Linux. The latter is stable, easy now to install, is secure and
just keeps on working problem free once installed.

 

[Mike Williams]

I have an Adaptec USB external drive enclosure with a WD 140GB drive.
XP freezes most of the time when I copy a large file to the external
drive (~1.4GB).

This is my second external drive enclosure. I bought an off brand that
did the same thing. I thought I would spend twice as much on a name
brand (ie. Adaptec) to solve the problem. No dice.

Any ideas on how to prevent the freezing?

I am running XP with service pack 2.

Try using the robocopy.exe command-line utility. It's usually a bit
smarter than Explorer when handling larger files.