Hard drives keep crashing with large file transfers

[agour]

Hey,

I'm in the process of backing up all my data onto multiple harddrives. It's about 3TB of photos, each file averaging about 20mb (so a LOT of files).

I have however had hard drives repeatedly crash and fail on me...

First up was a two drive RAID box. I was copying files over with teracopy, and I had an error along the lines of "the file is unreadable, the source or destination is faulty". So I powered everything down, rebooted.. and bam the computer no longer reads the drives. I formatted them and began copying files back on.

About 2.3 TB in I was having really slow speeds (2mbps), so I cancelled the copy. I then turned off the raid box (connected via e-sata), whilst the pink flashing lights were still saying it was being accessed. Of course when I rebooted I had the same problem as before - hard drives no longer readable until after format. I tried running chkdsk /f and it found some errors, but whilst fixing some it got stuck and didn't progress.

So I plugged a different drive into a different caddy. I was copying files on to it from my PC's E drive, and realised I could do with one of the files from my C drive. So I copied that to my USB pendrive, but whilst copying the main backup ran into a problem again "file is unreadable...". So I turned my PC off. Then the caddy off... Rebooted and bam - hard drive is no longer readable. I tried running CHKDSK, but it says the hard drive is RAW.

Any ideas why things might keep crashing? I do have a lot of drives plugged in which might bog the system down I guess. Four 1tb drives in the PC (set to 2x1TB RAID1 setups) and the C drive. Then the external drive plugged in via e-sata.

All hard drives I'm copying on to are brand new, as are the caddies. I guess otherwise I should just start a transfer, and not touch my PC?

Cheers!

[smargh]

memtest86+

Run h2testw on a known-good PC on one drive.
Run the "Verify" stage of h2testw on the affected PC, under various conditions - HDD connected internally, with caddy, with different caddy, different cable etc.

Check PSU voltages with a multimeter.

[Bonebreaker777]

I would try to check the SMART readings plus surface test (Verify mode in HDDScan).

Or try Erase mode in HDDScan and then Verify mode in HDDScan (helped me before to juggle some HDDs back to life and ever since).

Also would update your drivers in your PC (if you CBA to do it manually, use SmilDrivers)

[Taniniver]

Do you have any regular SATA ports left to connect to, rather than the eSATA one? Try connecting one of the troublesome drives directly rather than via the caddy as a test.

EDIT: If that doesn't work, it could be some kind of obscure software/driver bug. Try splitting things up - copy about 1 Tb of the files, then shut down and start up again and copy some more, see if you can get them all across that way.

[kompukare]

+1 to not using the eSATA port especially not that extra long lead you mentioned in your other thread. If the same thing still happens on an internal SATA port, try doing your copying from a live Linux DVD/USB stick. Live Linux is generally the fastest way to eliminate whether something is hardware or software problem

[agour]

Thanks for all the suggestions! I updated my drivers with the SlimDrivers software (thanks for suggesting it), and noticed some of them were 5~ years out of date.. although I have freshly formatted.

I changed the power source of the external drives from running on my PC's 4 way multiplug adapter thing, to running on a separate one.

So far.. so good! No crashes and I've managed to transfer all my data on to the drives. Now I'm verifying the contents with Beyond Compare.

[Abdulrehman]

My <a href="https://gmdrives.com/best-portable-external-hard-drives-for-pc-mac-xbox-and-ps4/"> External Hard drive </a> is also constantly crashing whenever i tried to transfer files. it creates too much frustration. is any short solution to that problem

[AGTDenton]

My drive is also constantly crashing whenever i tried to transfer files. it creates too much frustration. is any short solution to that problem

What are you transferring from and to.
What are the specs of the disk and the controller.

[Kumagoro]

If you are not already try using some file syncing program like Synctoy. You would at least get an error report and if it does drop out you can re run it and it would not need to copy the same stuff that was sucessful.

[peterb]

Check the cables - the socket casing can develop a hairline crack which leads to unreliability.

[Disturbedguy]

Holy thread necro...4 years..

[maksudmasud1]

Use winzip first then trasnfer.