External hard drive connection lost during large transfer or backup - HELP

[Brad Bailey]

I have a Seagate 250 GB hard drive (internal in enclosure connected by firewire as external) that shuts off connection during transfer of large file (did it on 6GB file) and during backup attempts. I get an error message that reads:
An error has occurred while writing backup data. The backup driver is not ready.” The red lights on enclosure come on as well.
Other message”
“Windows Delayed Write failed. Windows was unable to save all the data for the file I:\ (which refers to the backup file / location). The data has been lost. Error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save the file elsewhere.”

Any ideas what may cause this???

[redwudz]

'Delayed write failed'. I've seen that a few too many times. Usually with USB external drives. In the case of USB, it happens most often when the OS is doing something that interferes with the write to the external drive.
Causes can be the OS doing 'housekeeping' by moving files around or a software program like a antivirus that decides to run a scan while you are transferring to the drive.

Firewire has less of a problem with this, but it is still caused by an interruption of the data stream to the drive. Think of it like momentarily unplugging the drive cable and breaking the data stream.

Trying to pin down the causes is a little more complicated. It happens more often with some Firewire cards, and with some motherboard chipsets or a combination of both. It's also more common when other devices are plugged in to the Firewire/USB interfaces.

Sorry to be vague, but I never managed to find the exact causes, either. I would check your cables, maybe change your Firewire card, find out if the chipset in your external drive box is known to have problems, make sure there is nothing running in the background on the PC that could interfere with the transfer. You can monitor this somewhat with Task Manager.

If you do a Google search for 'delayed write failed', you may get more specific ideas. I can tell you if it happens often, the drive can get corrupted to the point it's unusable and you will have to reformat it. If you have any valuable data on it, you might want to back it up if this happens more often.

[Brad Bailey]

thanks. I can certainly turn off background programs and Virus protection. However it would seem stange that it stoppoed even in a single file transfer... as that was a brief process. I will also look into known problems with drive.

[redwudz]

I wish I knew a definitive answer. I have a 2.5" Fujitsu 80GB external drive I used for backups that has a Firewire interface. It would more often have the 'delayed write failed' with my laptop, but occasionally did it with my PC. The laptop used a PCMCIA Firewire card which I suspected was part of the problem. If I switched the drive to USB 2.0 (It's dual interface) on the laptop, it would work fine most of the time.

On the PC it was the opposite. The USB had the failure and the Firewire worked fine most of the time. But even on the the PC it did it several times in a row. I was able to unplug the drive and plug it back in and it would work again for a while. The obvious sign was the drive light would stay on all the time, the drive would run noisily, and finally the 'delayed write failed' balloon would come up. I assume it was trying to restart the data stream.

I went to a SATA external drive, and no problems anymore. I still use the Fujitsu drive occasionally, but I don't trust it anymore.