Terribly slow drive

[Nigel Bridgman-Elliot]

Perhaps the box has a cooling fan in it that is failing/failed and it is overheating.

 

Another fix which might work is to put a powered USB hub between them both.

 

Also, is the new motherboard running overclocked at all ?

 

And, the USB lead you are using, is it the correct one ? (eg. I seem to recal that there are differences between USB 1, 2 and 3 leads, such you may accidently be using a lead that cannot cope with the speed because it looks just the same as the one that worked!)

 

Do you have any other USB devices plugged in ? (It may help to reduce the number of items, as such a powered hub may well help here.)

 

Tried all the USB sockets in case the one you are using is duff in some way ?

 

 

You could also perhaps try creating a dual boot system with XP and seeing if it works any better than, that way if it works the same, it would tend to indicate more of a hardware/firmware issue than an OS/Driver issue.

[Fjool]

^ All excellent suggestions. Thanks, Nigel.

 

BTW, am I wrong or has it been quite a while since you last posted on Shetlink? Nice to see you back

[Nigel Bridgman-Elliot]

It has been a while, as I'm also in some 2,000+ other forums, it can take me a while to get around to checking them all, especially as of late being pressed for time in my hunt for a job/income to keep the wolf from the door.

 

And even if I don't post, I may well be reading, waiting for the moment to say something to contribute. (It's a pity the forum software doesn't log easily whose reading what.)

 

For backups I still use a rather old fashioned approach of HD caddies, simple and uncomplicated (For the most part.. except with old hardware that struggles to deal with anything above 250Gb in size.), which enables me to easily plug the HD into any PC to get the data off. (Though more complicated these days as the HD's I use are PATA ones and not SATA, and not every new motherboard has a very reliable PATA interface anymore.. (This newish Abit MB here for example, the PATA doesn't work with CD/DVD drives at all well, nor does it function with PCI RS232 cards..))

 

A friend of mine did try burning his backups to CD, but then found when he wanted the backups back, the discs had got corrupted!

 

I would worry that DVD's might easily suffer the same kind of issues for long term storage.

 

As such, I go for RAID 1 (Mirrored twin HD's, those special edition WD ones are rather nice I find.) on a seperate fileserver, then to HD caddies, then to offsite HD caddies.

 

You can never have too many backups I reckon

 

Incidently, finding a reliable RAID 1 that is cheap is somewhat of a challange, I've only found one that actually works as advertised so far, and that is the Promise FastTrack TX2000, it is getting rather old now and I think is limited to nothing bigger than 250Gb HD's. One might hope their newer cards work too.. But as I have tested some of their previous cards in anger so to speak and found they didn't work, just because one card works, doesn't mean the others will unless you test them!

 

Most, or all that I have tested so far MB built in RAID 1 mirrored, do not actually work in practice, as they fail to copy the early tracks from one HD to another and should your primary fail, they won't boot from the secondary flawlessly. (Not without a lot of techincal doohookery.)

 

It all works fine if you yank the primary out whilst its running, but as soon as you reboot, your find it doesn't work

 

Plus, if one of the drives degrades slowly, so far testing wise all that happens is the errors get mirrored too.. (I've yet to have a drive fail under the latest Promise controller, so cannot report whether it is just as bad as every other one I tried.)

 

Reliable backups seem rather fraught with difficulties in practice it seems.

[Fjool]

It has taken days, but I ran Scandisk and did a full bad-sector search and am now able to pull the remaining undamaged files from the drive. I guess the cat knocked it over or something, because there must have been problems with reading some of the data.

 

Once I've retrieved everything from it, I'm going to return the thing and get something else as a backup store.

 

Once again, thanks for all the suggestions everyone.

[Spinner72]

In the grand scheme of things, storage has never been cheaper, and if you compare to what it would have been to print all those photos a few years back its even better! Sorry not to offer any help, but maybe this will influence your future choice :

 

Following a couple of failures myself, I have now lost any real dedication to one manufacturer or another. I have all my music, photos and personal files stored in triplicate, on Seagate, WD and Samsung drives.

 

I also intend to chuck my photos up to a private account like picasa or similar (any suggestions?) both as an additional back up and for "get from anywhere" convenience.