Problems with hard drive in a USB2 HDD Enclosure

"It was suggested to me that perhaps DMA has been turned off for this drive, but I could not find any reference to DMA for this drive in Device Manager."

 

The drive sits behind the usb controller in the enclosure, so you will not have access to this setting.

 

Make sure the drive is not heavily fragmented, there needs to be at least 15% freespace to defrag, it will take a while on a usb hard drive.

 

If it can read fast but write slow, it is not the dma setting even if you had access to it.

 

 

Are you saying you tried a different drive in the same enclosure and it does not have the same issues as the 750gb drive?    Don't think you could have been using the 750gb for 2 years as it has only been out about one year.  Nevertheless, run some diagnostics on the drive to check it out.

I find Disk Defrag on Windows Vista rather strange.  Under Win XP you were able to select which drive to run Defrag on and you could see the progress of it.  When I run Defrag on Windows Vista, and select the option Degragment Now, it then says Defraging Hard Disks - This may take a few minutes to a few hours, but you do not see the progress and can not select a speciic hard drive, or have I not configured it properly?

 

Are there any BETTER utilities I could run - ie not Microsoft Windows?

Yes they removed user interaction in Vista.

 

I use perfect disk myself.   http://www.raxco.com/products/perfectdisk2k/index_consumer.cfm

I have just downloaded the evaluation version of PerfectDisk v8.0, however it is not showing my 2 hard drives which are in  a USB2 HDD Enclosure.  It has found my main hard drive which is connected inside my PC with an IDE cable.  does PerfectDisk not work on drives connected via USB?

Go to Configuration/advanced configuration/removable storage tab, tick the box, hit OK.

Thanks mombodog.

 

I have 2 X 750Gb drives both in a USB2 HDD Enclosure. 

 

When I ran PerfectDisk on the one I am having problems with, where is says Moving Out File, it would take about 3 to 4 minutes or more on each file.  This drive was 13% fragmented.

 

When I ran PerfectDisk on my other 750Gb drive which actually hold more files than the faulty one, the WHOLE process took less than 10 minutes. 

 

As I write this PerectDisk it is still struggling with my slow drive!! Been running over 30 minutes and still only 1% complete!! 

 

Are there any other utilities I should be running?  Are there any utilities that will actually check the hard drive itself and report any problems with it?

 

I assume PerfectDisk is purely a defrag utility.

How much free space on the  problem drive?

 

 

The problem may be the usb controller in the enclosure is bad, and even if the controller is good, it still interferes with any diagnostic tool, you would have to remove the drive from the enclosure and put it in a PC to run diagnostics on it.

If you think the external enclosure is bad, you should remove the drive from the enclosure and plug it into the PC's IDE (or SATA, if your external drive was SATA) port. Test it from there, it will be much faster than testing it in the USB enclosure and you will also eliminate the drive as the source of the problem. Run chkdsk if reqd.

 

Defragging an external drive will always be slower than defragging an internal drive. Also keep an eye on the enclosure so that it doesnt overheat when running continuously for a long time. If possible point a table fan or something on it. I used to have some lousy enclosures with poor ventilation that would run so hot that I could barely hold them in my hand after a while.

 

I personally use Diskeeper Pro 2007 for my defrags, and I found it to be much faster than the others in defragging. I haven't checked its speed on an external drive though. You can download the free trial version from  http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.asp Try the Pro version (thats what I have) and see if it speeds up your defrag.

 

If it is still slow, then you may be better off defragging it when it is set as an internal drive. I know that diskeeper defrags the internal drives really quickly.