Hello. I have an external hard drive, 500gb lacie connected via usb2.0, to my laptop. I have music on alomost everyday for several hours, which runs off of the ext. hd. The drive has been frequently freezeing. Is this becuase of its constant use? Someone told me that ext. are not ment for this, and that is why your having the prob. Thanks
Have you noticed the freezing after several hours of use or even after a short while. Could be due to overheating if it occurs after a few hours. This can happen to even new products on the market. I'll wait on your response before I bombard you with unnecesary suggestions. BTW when you say the drive has been freezing does this hang up your entire system or just the drive alone becomes inaccessible.
thanks for the reply, it freezes just the file on the ext. hd not the system (as long as I manually turn of the hd), it's about a year old. I never considered overheating to be a prob., but I belive it's is not that because it is in a cool place by an ac unit. I've tried defragmenting but it just froze, even right when I started it, so i don't think its the heat. What sugg. do you have? thanks.
Please indulge me and check to ensure that the fan in the external drive case is working, just to discard any possibility of overheating. Other causes could be 1 or more bad sectors which can't be read or filesystem corruption, overwhelming your system resources with whatever player software you are using especially if you have added any new RAM intensive software recently and all are running together(scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one). If you don't turn it off does the entire system then freezes as well. If you turn it off, then then on and restart the laptop does it work at all and is the drive always seen as an external drive on your computer everytime that you startup. First try to back up your files if you can, even if you have to make several attempts. Next try to see if you can run scandisk. Post back and let me know if you are able to run scandisk at all. BTW does yours also have a firewire interface.
Ok, so I finally got the scan disk to run, it ran for about an hour and froze at about 6%. I also ran all of the other utilites like checking for errors and defrag., but all froze. The fan is working fine, so it can't be overheating. When it freezes any program using it freezes, ex. my computer, winamp, media player. If I turn the hd off, any of the programs uding it unfreezes. Other programs and the system itself works fine and is not affected by the freezing. The laptop sees it always as an external hd. It has firewire, but it does no work properly, agian it freezes. I'll try to back it up, but its 500gb, about 400 is used, a little hard to backup. Any other suggestions? Thanks
