External HDD driving me crazy

[Tsunami]

My Western Digital My Book is causing me a bunch of headaches. I've had it for at least 1.5 years, and with the last half a year its causing problems when writing to the drive. My drive bugs out when writing anything larger than 2GB. If its anything over 2GB my drive hangs and I can't view it, or access any files on it. It usually takes a reboot of the drive and to get it to work properly I have to perform a full check disk on it for it to work at all.

I have a lot of data on this drive, anything I can do to protect it? It makes it hard to pull data off of it at 2GB a time.

Western digital's drive checker says its ok, and there are no problems. Clearly its wrong right? What can I do to not make the drive fritz out?

I'm getting delayed write errors. Western Digital says to use their diagnostic tool on it to check for errors. Others have said my HD is fragmented. Someone said that if there is traffic on the USB bus causing the data transfer to fail.

WD also told me to look at this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908673/en-us and to try that hotfix. well, the hotfix isn't there for download. DOH!

got any ideas guys?

 

[Barney]

I would look on Newegg reviews to see what people did. When I was looking for a new external I was looking at the WD MyBook but it got very mixed reviews and went with a Lacie instead. You might have to get a new external, most people I saw on Newegg said that their hard drive just died. I'm sorry for your loss.

 

[FreeDoM]

Maybe it's not the HDD but the connection method? Are you using USB? Could be the port as well.

 

[SailorAlea]

I'm not an expert on these, but my instinct is that you have the external drive encoded in FAT16.

FAT16 isn't capable of having files over 2GB. Old Windows versions won't recognize hard drives bigger than 2GB, too.

 

[Prozac]

I'm not an expert on these, but my instinct is that you have the external drive encoded in FAT16.

FAT16 isn't capable of having files over 2GB. Old Windows versions won't recognize hard drives bigger than 2GB, too.

It's rather unlikely that such a new drive would have been formatted using Fat16..
however it's pretty much the only option.

Drives failing at a certain size, no matter how much data you have on the disk is rather.. rare and probably not hardware related

 

[SailorAlea]

I think I remember reading that most external drives, believe it or not, still use FAT instead of NTFS. Let me know what you find out..

 

[KarrdeKNR]

There's always the possibility that the drive's dying. My Lacie 500 gig has always been fine and hasn't had issues. But I haven't tried moving such huge files.

 

[Tsunami]

Yeah i thought about that. my warranty runs out this month, so i may bust open the enclosure and put the drive in my system.

 

[SS4 Gogeta]

Maybe it's not the HDD but the connection method? Are you using USB? Could be the port as well.

I would have to second that. Are you able to try a different USB port?

I had a similar issue and it ended up being a spare USB addon card I had Installed.