Why do USB hard drives suck so bad?

[ShawnD1]

Not the drive itself, but the USB-SATA converter. This last one died just a few hours ago. When I turn the drive on, it spins up then makes 3 clicking noises then shuts off. It shuts off in such a short period of time that the computer doesn't even detect that a USB device connected. I've tried the drive on 3 different computers and it doesn't work on any of them.

Hoping like hell that I can manage to get the data off the drive, I took the drive out of the case and put it into one of my computers. It works just fine. The BIOS sees it, Windows sees it, Sandra says it can read and write at almost 60mb/s, it can play Fallout 3 and GTA 4 (this hard drive had all of my games on it). I'm still going to backup everything just in case the hard drive really is broken, but for the time being it looks like a perfectly healthy drive.

Is there some unavoidable problem with USB-SATA conversion that makes these things bound to fail? All 3 of the drives still work, so the converter is the only thing I can think of that would be broken. I should probably note that I purchased these as external drives; I didn't just put hard drives into cases.

 

[Elixer]

What brand case is this? We talking Freeagent type of external unit, or something else?

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Elixer
What brand case is this? We talking Freeagent type of external unit, or something else?

Last to fail was Cavalry. I also had a Western Digital and one with a giant "e" on it which Windows identified as being a Western Digital. The drives themselves are great, but the converter thingy sucks. Take the drive out of the external case, put them into the computer (internal), and they work fine.

 

[boomhower]

Have you tried different USB ports? It could be something going on there. If you have been using the back try the front or vise versa.

 

[Elixer]

It could be the USB port(s) on the mobo or case are bad.
If it was different brands external cases, and they all suffer the same fate...Or it might be the wallwart you are using, and or power issues.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Elixer
It could be the USB port(s) on the mobo or case are bad.
If it was different brands external cases, and they all suffer the same fate...Or it might be the wallwart you are using, and or power issues.

It's not the USB ports since it doesn't work on any of my computers and all of my other USB stuff still works.

I'm thinking power issue too. Computer power supplies are very high quality and provide excellent voltage regulation. Does the power supply to a USB hard drive have that quality? Possibly not.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've heard this complaint by several IT consultants who do small businesses. Most of us have been doing backups to USB rather than tape for several years (although many of us have moved on to SATA/eSATA drives in the past two years).

I've been hired to recover data from several USB external drives (the big WD housings in particular) that had failed USB converters or power supplies. The drives themselves were fine.

Two possible explanations:

1) The IDE-to-USB converters chips or boards may be prone to overheating. Most name-brand external drives (like WD, Seagate, Cavalry, etc.) have NO COOLING FANS. I refuse to use these because backup/verify durations of 5+ hours (sometimes much longer) are often seen. With no forced-air cooling, it's likely that the drives and housings and chips get pretty warm.

2) The power supplies used for external drives are nowhere near the quality of actual PCs.

There might be other reasons that I'm missing. In the end, I've found USB external housings to be less reliable that SATA housings or trays and I've found name-brand external drives (like WD) to be lacking durability for use as backup drives.

My current recommendation for backups sytems for small business servers is the use of internally-mounted SATA drive trays. I use Grantite Digital's removable SATA drive trays and have yet to have any fail in the ten-or-so businesses where I'm using them, making daily backups of their entire servers.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: Elixer
It could be the USB port(s) on the mobo or case are bad.
If it was different brands external cases, and they all suffer the same fate...Or it might be the wallwart you are using, and or power issues.

It's not the USB ports since it doesn't work on any of my computers and all of my other USB stuff still works.

I'm thinking power issue too. Computer power supplies are very high quality and provide excellent voltage regulation. Does the power supply to a USB hard drive have that quality? Possibly not.

Of course it don't work *after* the fact, but it still could have caused the issue in the first place. That is why I was thinking USB port issue.

Those externals aren't powered off the USB port are they? They have a wall wart that you plug in right?

Of course, the warranty is void if you open the suckers up, but since you already did, can you check what chipset they are using?

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Elixer
Those externals aren't powered off the USB port are they? They have a wall wart that you plug in right?

Of course, the warranty is void if you open the suckers up, but since you already did, can you check what chipset they are using?

The broken ones are all wall powered for 3.5" drives. Strangely enough, the USB powered 2.5" drive connected to one of my other computers still works (and runs at a much lower temperature).

The chipset for a SATA-USB looks like this:
initio
1N1C-160SL
A226P
B65841
200709

I also have a failed IDE-USB:
CY7C688300C-56PVXC
B 04 PHI 0643
CYP 665465

 

[imported_Jid]

damn, that sucks.. I'm hoping to do my backups to an external drive too, it'd be really convenient especially since we got a couple computers including laptops. If it dies on me within the first month though I'll be pissed

 

[GundamF91]

It's the cooling. They need an active fan blowing on it to keep cool. Even if it seems hot inside the PC case, the airflow there keeps the HDD cooler.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

This may be a cheap ass way of doing it but don't use the enclosure. I've been using the usb to SAT/ide adapters for years and have never had a problem. If I'm just doing it to back up a PC or need to pull data from a drive, it's easier to plug in the cable adapter than to mount a drive in an enclosure.

Now if you want this to be a perminant solution then look into the Vantec (antec) enclosures.
Mine has been running a 500GB hard drive non stop for over a year now and it sits in a window sill and get's direct sunlight during the day. It's never skipped a beat and has no active cooling what so ever.

 

[RebateMonger]

I've only started doing this, but I'm using SATA docking stations to hold backup drives. The drives are held vertically and are wide open to the air. It seems unlikely they'd overheat. No fan to fail.

Plus, you can buy a single "enclosure" and use it for many SATA drives. Similar to JeffreyLebowski's suggestion in concept.

At this moment, I'm making a backup of my Hyper-V virtualized Windows Home server using "Windows Server Backup (built into Server 2008). Right now, WHS is a single virtual hard drive file about 900 GB in size stored on a single 1 TB Hitachi drive. The backup is going to my Seagate 1.5 TB drive.

The 1.5 TB Seagate is mounted in a BlacX docking station and connected with an eSATA cable. Looks like it'll take a couple of hours to do the backup. Fast. After 1/2 hour and 200 GB transferred (100 MB/sec), the drive is just warm to the touch.