Files copied to external hard drive are corrupted

[DJ Kazuya]

I recently bought a Maxtor external hard drive for use to transfer
files from an older, space-challenged computer. I had no need for the
backup software, so I just plugged it in (USB 2.0) and Windows XP
recognized it as an empty NTFS drive. So I did a drag and drop of
around 75GB of files onto the new drive. The files are almost all RAR
archives ranging from 5MB to 50MB (the vast majority are around 10MB).
So we're talking about a few thousand files. The copying was fast and
went smoothly. Out of the 1000 or so of the copied archives I've
tested so far on the new drive about 9 or 10 of the archives were
corrupted. I checked the originals and they were fine, and when I
individually re-copied those archives on the new drive they ended up
fine... but it seems that invariably about 1 out of every 100 of the
archives copied during the "mass copying" is turning up bad. Is this
just a consequence of doing such a massive amount of copying at once,
especially over USB instead of a more proven interface like IDE? Or
could there be something more at work here, such as a bad external
drive or Windows screwing up? I've only had the drive for a few days
but all seems well with it; it's very quiet and runs cool.

peace Kazuya

 

[Rolf Blom G (AS/EAB)]

I recently bought a Maxtor external hard drive for use to transfer
files from an older, space-challenged computer. I had no need for the
backup software, so I just plugged it in (USB 2.0) and Windows XP
recognized it as an empty NTFS drive. So I did a drag and drop of
around 75GB of files onto the new drive. The files are almost all RAR
archives ranging from 5MB to 50MB (the vast majority are around 10MB).
So we're talking about a few thousand files. The copying was fast and
went smoothly. Out of the 1000 or so of the copied archives I've
tested so far on the new drive about 9 or 10 of the archives were
corrupted. I checked the originals and they were fine, and when I
individually re-copied those archives on the new drive they ended up
fine... but it seems that invariably about 1 out of every 100 of the
archives copied during the "mass copying" is turning up bad. Is this
just a consequence of doing such a massive amount of copying at once,
especially over USB instead of a more proven interface like IDE? Or
could there be something more at work here, such as a bad external
drive or Windows screwing up? I've only had the drive for a few days
but all seems well with it; it's very quiet and runs cool.

peace Kazuya

If you put the drive on an internal position, is copying ok then?
(Always good to see if the basic parts work.)

I've heard of something similar, related to a specific combination of an
Asus mobo with an nvidia chipset, and a misconfigured bios, where a
setting called 'clock spread spectrum' was enabled by default.

Disabling this setting (required a bios update) fixed the problem in
this specific case.

/Rolf

 

[Arno Wagner]

I recently bought a Maxtor external hard drive for use to transfer
files from an older, space-challenged computer. I had no need for the
backup software, so I just plugged it in (USB 2.0) and Windows XP
recognized it as an empty NTFS drive. So I did a drag and drop of
around 75GB of files onto the new drive. The files are almost all RAR
archives ranging from 5MB to 50MB (the vast majority are around 10MB).
So we're talking about a few thousand files. The copying was fast and
went smoothly. Out of the 1000 or so of the copied archives I've
tested so far on the new drive about 9 or 10 of the archives were
corrupted. I checked the originals and they were fine, and when I
individually re-copied those archives on the new drive they ended up
fine... but it seems that invariably about 1 out of every 100 of the
archives copied during the "mass copying" is turning up bad. Is this
just a consequence of doing such a massive amount of copying at once,
especially over USB instead of a more proven interface like IDE? Or

Not really.

could there be something more at work here, such as a bad external
drive or Windows screwing up? I've only had the drive for a few days
but all seems well with it; it's very quiet and runs cool.

I would suspect that this is actually a problem with defective
hardware in your PC. A very good candidate is defective RAM.
On bulk copies a larger portion of the main meory is used for
buffering. It may be that the defective bit(s) are only used
then.

Advice: Run memtest86+ from http://www.memtest.org/ for some
time. Usually a few hours are enough for reliable diagnosis,
although I had one Infinion RAM that exhibited one error in
about 30 hours of testing. Still cirrupted data.

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

I recently bought a Maxtor external hard drive for use to transfer
files from an older, space-challenged computer. I had no need for the
backup software, so I just plugged it in (USB 2.0) and Windows XP
recognized it as an empty NTFS drive. So I did a drag and drop of
around 75GB of files onto the new drive. The files are almost all RAR
archives ranging from 5MB to 50MB (the vast majority are around 10MB).
So we're talking about a few thousand files. The copying was fast and
went smoothly. Out of the 1000 or so of the copied archives I've
tested so far on the new drive about 9 or 10 of the archives were
corrupted. I checked the originals and they were fine, and when I
individually re-copied those archives on the new drive they ended up
fine... but it seems that invariably about 1 out of every 100 of the
archives copied during the "mass copying" is turning up bad. Is this
just a consequence of doing such a massive amount of copying at once,
especially over USB instead of a more proven interface like IDE?

Nope, you shouldnt be getting that result.

Or could there be something more at work here,
Yes.

such as a bad external drive

Very likely.

or Windows screwing up?

Unlikely since you dont see many getting that result.

Its more likely to be a hardware problem with the PC.

I've only had the drive for a few days but all seems well with it;

Except that 10% of the files copied to it are corrupted.

 

[DJ Kazuya]

I would suspect that this is actually a problem with defective
hardware in your PC. A very good candidate is defective RAM.
On bulk copies a larger portion of the main meory is used for
buffering. It may be that the defective bit(s) are only used
then.

Advice: Run memtest86+ from http://www.memtest.org/ for some
time. Usually a few hours are enough for reliable diagnosis,
although I had one Infinion RAM that exhibited one error in
about 30 hours of testing. Still cirrupted data.

Arno

Hot damn, you should be a fortune teller. I got home and ran the
memory test, pretty much from the word go the thing was telling me that
I had errors galore. Played switcheroo with the DIMMs for a bit in
order to isolate the faulty one... replaced it and ran the tests for a
couple of hours with no errors.

Then copied the exact same files as I did before to the external hard
drive (had formatted it eariler). Did a test of the first 1000 or so
files as I did before and this time... not a single corrupt file!
Thank you very much Arno! You're the man... thanks also to Rod and
Rolf for their input.

peace Kazuya

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hot damn, you should be a fortune teller. I got home and ran the
memory test, pretty much from the word go the thing was telling me that
I had errors galore. Played switcheroo with the DIMMs for a bit in
order to isolate the faulty one... replaced it and ran the tests for a
couple of hours with no errors.

Then copied the exact same files as I did before to the external hard
drive (had formatted it eariler). Did a test of the first 1000 or so
files as I did before and this time... not a single corrupt file!
Thank you very much Arno!

You a very welcome.

You're the man...

Well, let me just say I had this problem several times before (I work
with huge amounts of data on self-built hardware) and reconized it.

Arno