External HDD crashes (MFT Related?)

[dgf]

Hi !
Thanks for this amazing app !

I'm having some troubles with an 1tb external hard disk usb 2.0 ntfs-formatted on windows 7, i have some random crashes while i'm writing or reading a file on disk, it stops responding, the copy box hangs as the explorer.exe, the led still blink so it's not a power failure, when this happens i have to turn off the disk and turn on again, of course if i am copying some files to disk when it crashes the file that was writing at the time gets corrupted. I've done a lot of chkdsk's and i backed up the entire hdd and i got no problems.

I found that my MFT Zone is in the middle of the hard disk, could it cause this type of crashes ?

Offtopic : This kind of crashes could cause damage to the files that was on the HDD besides the one that was writing at the time?

Thanks !!

[Darlis]

There are a lot of possibilities:

• Broken HDD: You can try to use CrystalDiskInfo to check the SMART values.
• Defective USB case: Put the HDD in another case or plug it directly in the mainboard.
• Broken USB cable: Try a different one.
• Driver problems: Update you chipset drivers.

I found that my MFT Zone is in the middle of the hard disk, could it cause this type of crashes ?

No.

Offtopic : This kind of crashes could cause damage to the files that was on the HDD besides the one that was writing at the time?

NTFS is quite resistant against files system corruption but if you've enabled the cache on the USB disk (the default) it's very likely to get corrupted entries because the changes in the file system are not committed to the disk right away.

[dgf]

Thanks for the reply

If some entries got corrupted, chkdsk should have detect it right ?

[Darlis]

Not necessarily, it depends on the type of the corruption. CheckDisk can not check the integrity of the files themselves for example.
If you've moved all files from the disk, format the disk so you can be sure to have a 100% intact file system.