As much as I like the Seagate FreeAgent line of external hard drives, and appreciate their 5 year warranty, it seems they go to sleep when unused for a period of time. I have not yet seen a problem with the drives waking up for use as a backup target after a long sleep, but I am just waiting for that to happen. When it does I guess I will just write a quick task to run every 30 minutes or so to prevent the drive from going to sleep. Something like a dir *.* batch file. I wish I could access the hdd itself directly and disable that feature, but doing so may just nullify the 5 year warranty <g>.
Another area to look into is to make certain the USB connection is not being put to sleep after a period of time. Some power settings can wreak havoc on scheduled events. I make a point is disabling all CMOS/BIOS and OS based power saving and screen saver processes with any machine I work with. That seems to eliminate a lot of grief. Gil > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Malcolm Greene > Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 4:38 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [NF] Error writing to external USB drive > > > Hoping to pick your brains on this stumper. Customer has a server with > an external USB drive used for backups. We run a backup job (Acronis) at > 1am every morning to backup about 10G of data to this drive. > Approximately once a week on a random day, our backup software reports a > write error when trying to backup to this drive. The drive has over 200G > of free space and chkdsk reports no problems. There are no error > messages in the server's event logs. The unit is not on a UPS, but other > workstations on the same line (without UPS's) do not show evidence of a > reboot due to power loss. > > We do a lot of reading and writing to this backup drive during the day > and have never encountered a write problem. This leads me to believe > that we don't have a bad drive (not sure if this is a rational > conclusion or not<g>). > > We're researching the problem with Acronis, but I'm skeptical they are > going to be of any help. > > Any ideas on diagnosing this problem? > > Thanks! > Malcolm > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
