I purchased a Silverstone MS01 external USB hard drive case and fitted a Hitachi HDS725050KLAT80 (500 GB IDE-ATA) hard drive in the case. After installing the software and drivers provided by Silverstone, I connected the case to my IBM 8183-GNU Thinkcentre running XP Pro. The computer "saw" the drive OK and it showed up as Disk 1 in disk management. I commenced a normal format on it and it apparently started formatting OK. Not knowing how long such a large HD would take on USB, I let it run...4 hours turned into 10 hours and I finally stopped it at about the 20 hour point. At one time during a look on it about the 17 hour point the "Formatting..." status had become "Formatting (2%)" I didn't think this was normal so I stopped it at the 20 hour point as mentioned above.
I took the drive case and plugged it to my "test stand" computer running Win 2000 Pro on FAT32 filesystems and started a normal format there. Again it looked like nothing was really happening so I cancelled and tried Quick Format. That took about 30 seconds and then the drive was there in Explorer with a letter and chkdsk revealed all to be OK. I thereupon copied about 30 GB worth of files to it which went OK.
I moved the drive back to my IBM, plugged it, XP saw it and then copied about 190 GB of files there to it-all seemed OK and chkdsk on that machine also revealed all OK.
What the heck happened? Why did normal format take so long and never even finish? Why was quick format so quick? Like I say, the drive seems OK but I am not 100% sure.
I took the drive case and plugged it to my "test stand" computer running Win 2000 Pro on FAT32 filesystems and started a normal format there. Again it looked like nothing was really happening so I cancelled and tried Quick Format. That took about 30 seconds and then the drive was there in Explorer with a letter and chkdsk revealed all to be OK. I thereupon copied about 30 GB worth of files to it which went OK.
I moved the drive back to my IBM, plugged it, XP saw it and then copied about 190 GB of files there to it-all seemed OK and chkdsk on that machine also revealed all OK.
What the heck happened? Why did normal format take so long and never even finish? Why was quick format so quick? Like I say, the drive seems OK but I am not 100% sure.