Write failure in the external drive

[shanku]

Hello members ,

Whenever I try to save large number of files to the external drive ( with USB2 casing and Barracuda 80 gb disc ) , I get the message Windows Delayed Write Failed . The external drive gets disconnected from the system .

My computer is with Athlon 64 3200+ , Asus A8N-E + xfx 6200 gr card , 1 gb RAM and windows xp sp 2 .

I did try by disabling the caching for the drive but that did not help . Searching the net , it seems not to be a very uncommon problem . Since there are many suggestions , it is confusing . What I understood is that , it is an issue of speed of the data transfer and intake . In this regard atleast one reference I got was

All I had to do was connect the 250 gb drive internally through the IDE interface and the data transfer was flawless.

Please help ( and thanks in advance for ur replies ) .

[Eazy]

I had this problem when I attached a 200GB Seagate drive to a USB2 case - after some troubleshooting I realised that the controller in my USB2 case was not capable of addressing space on HDDs larger than 127GB. When I Partitioned the 200GB to 127GB for the first partion and the balance space as the second partition I found I could write perfectly to the first partition but not at all to the second.

Maybe the USB2 case you have has the same problem but if you get this error with a 80GB HDD than maybe that is because your case cannot address HDDs larger than 32GB. Make the first partition as 32 GB and use the balance space for a second partition and see if you run into problems only when writing to the second partition.

I have now switched to a Vantec USB2 case - ( they are a bit expensive 2500 for a 3.5" case and 1200 for a 2.5" case ) - and I now have no problems with my Maxtor 250GB drive in this case.

EDIT: also check if the HDD has been jumpered for a 32GB size limit.