I bought a HDD Enclosure

[Mobius]

I'm in Australia visiting my family and I filled my 500gb SATA Western Digital HD with films and stuff to watch on my brother's PC but having arrived here realised he doesn't have SATA on his a7n8x-x mobo. This is the one I bought and I'm having some problems.

It's all connected and the drivers that came with it are installed, however it doesn't seem to work properly. It turns on (sometimes) but usually not for long. It's pot luck whether or not transferring a file from my HD to my bro's PC works or not, as the HD enclosure seems to turn on and off when it pleases (the blue LED light indicates this) aaaaand there are other issues such as the fact that when the enclosure is connected when I turn the PC on, windows won't boot. It goes to a black screen after the windows loading screen, and unless I remove the USB 2.0 it stays there, however the instance I remove it the PC boots up fine. Similar problem in Windows, in that when it's connected My Computer and stuff won't load, then as soon as I remove the USB lead everything I've clicked will suddenly open. I have managed to get a few things off of it, but most of the time it either doesn't work, works for a brief period, or disconnects itself whilst transferring data.

I've unplugged everything, refitted the HD and so forth, and reinstalled the drivers. I'm really stuck for ideas now.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[Kryten]

My first thought is a fucked peice of hardware. Those cheap enclosures are often troublesome, and it's very likely power related to boot. Either crap build quality internally or the power brick is naff. You shouldnt need any drivers whatsoever to pick it up over USB - should be literally plug and play.
I'd take it back if possible and get it changed.

 

[Mobius]

I think that might be the case too, but would that account for it Windows hanging during booting, and My Computer not opening whilst the equipment is connected to the PC? At the moment I'm turning the switch on the Enclosure on and can feel the enclosure vibrating (probably the hard drive inside) however the LED just flicks on briefly, instead of remaining solid. The HD doesn't appear on my pc either

Oh, just tried turning the enclosure on with the HD inside, but NOT connected to the PC via USB, and it's on and the LED is solid, so there's definitely an issue with the enclosure being connected to the PC, whether it's the USB slot, or something, I'm not sure. I've tried it in every USB slot on the computer however, and the same issue occurs. Those same USB slots are fine for other peripherals.

 

[Kryten]

Yes, the computer will be polling the USB ports and devices nearly constantly when My Computer is being opened and during the boot process, so that would again tally with faulty hardware.
I get this rather often with cheap Sumovision (or Sumvision, sumthing like that) enclosures, and tend to stick to Icybox for stuff I use day to day.

 

[Mobius]

Thanks Kryten I think I'm going to return it on Saturday (It's ANZAC day tomorrow so I expect everything will be closed) - there aren't many shops around here, so I just bought the first thing I could find. I'll look around at the weekend and see if I can find a better brand.

 

[inactionman]

I find the best one is just a cable that converts SATA to USB and supplies power. A shop like maplins should sell that (if they have them over there).

 

[Mobius]

I've been playing around with it some more today and it seems to connect to the computer okay, and I have been transferring files under 500mb to the PC with no problem (the blue LED light flickers) but then when I try and transfer a bigger file the LED turns off at some stage between transferring, and it doesn't work. So it seems to be an issue with either too big files, or something like that? Does anyone know why that might be?

 

[TdC]

depends what your filesystem is and OS mostly, Mob. There's usually a 2GB boundary though.