I have a new Seagate external 500G hard drive and wonder if this is typical.

1)
I store and run some Visual Studio, Eclipse, RenderMonkey projects on it.

Frequently I save in Eclipse/RenderMonkey and the IDEs hang for a good 30 seconds or so. Presumably this is for the drive to spin up.

2)
The CheckDisk utility springs up one time or two to alert that I best run it for the external disk. I comply and it proceeds to do its thing repairing.

Afterwards I discover some files are corrupted. I.e., my Visual Studio solution file is half-filled with the contents of a GCC makefile.

So either CheckDisk was unable to repair or erroneously repaired and made it worse.


By the way, CheckDisk didn't detect bad sector, and the disk is 2% fragmented according to DiskDefrag tool.

Before I wipe and try anew, how can I know if my problems will go away if I just get a different drive?

Installing/running applications from an external drive like that I imagine isn't a great idea - especially if it is running over USB 2.0 or something like that. I'd think it'd be considerably slower than a SATA or eSATA connection (or USB 3.0... if you are so fortunate).

It sounds to me like it could be a bad disk. I'd be very leery about putting anything critical on it.

No, it is not typical if you have everything set up properly.

Correctly installed, an external drive should behave exactly the same as an internal hard drive. The media format shouldn't matter either: it should behave correctly for an external HDD or thumb drive or flash card or NAS device. They may be faster or slower to access, they may have faster or slower transfer rates, and they may have cache considerations, but they should all perform fundamentally the same.

Each has their own performance characteristics but you should never have corrupt data.


The kind of corruption you described looks more like a cache corruption. Turn off the write cache and see if that affects anything.

No, it is not typical if you have everything set up properly.

Correctly installed, an external drive should behave exactly the same as an internal hard drive. The media format shouldn't matter either: it should behave correctly for an external HDD or thumb drive or flash card or NAS device. They may be faster or slower to access, they may have faster or slower transfer rates, and they may have cache considerations, but they should all perform fundamentally the same.

Each has their own performance characteristics but you should never have corrupt data.

Do you need to install? When I got it I simply plugged the drive in via USB and copied my stuff to it. I know Seagate has some software loaded on it, but I assume they weren't essential and removed them.

For safety, I do stop this USB device on Windows prior to connecting it to another computer. There were times I couldn't, but I assume at most I should have lost some files rather than getting corruption.

I am leery after the CheckDisk fiasco and would be interested in trusted backup and diagnostic solutions.

Would it be likely that maybe there's some kind of signal noise on or around the USB cable that might cause data corruption?

<br />Would it be likely that maybe there's some kind of signal noise on or around the USB cable that might cause data corruption?<br />

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Happened again.

Though in the morning CheckDisk prompted it wants to run (I didn't allow it, recalling the previous incident), it was fine working with the disk the whole day.

But after getting home with it my code became corrupt. I sought CheckDisk to do its repair but didn't recover much.

I guess I'm at fault since when I was leaving, I disconnected the drive without 'safely remove hardware' due to mistaking something else for the "it's safe to remove the hard drive" text bubble.

Nonetheless, prior to physically disconnecting the drive all applications were closed and drive should be idle because I was to going to 'safely remove hardware'.

So it seems today's corruption is due to act of unsafe hardware removal. Don't think that's the norm since I can yank flash drives without safe removal and lose nothing.

So it seems today's corruption is due to act of unsafe hardware removal. Don't think that's the norm since I can yank flash drives without safe removal and lose nothing.

As far as I'm aware, FAT-formatted removable drives default to "optimise for quick removal", whereas NTFS-formatted removable drives are limited to "optimise for performance", which requires an explicit eject/"safely remove". You can configure this setting through Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) - right-click the disk, go into Properties and change the setting on the Policy tab.

However, I'm not entirely sure how this feature works; in the past, I have not been able to format removable drives as NTFS without setting the disk to "optimise for performance", whereas I am currently reading an NTFS-formatted SD card on a drive that claims it's "optimised for quick removal".