Hi OSP!

Good morning!

Does anyone use a SimpleTech external HD? Sometime Saturday night mine stopped working. The problem is EVERYTHING is on it. I use the 120 Gig model. I will install the driver again today to see if that helps.

BTW - this drive hasn't been the best; is there a particular brand of external HD that you'd recommend that is more reliable? As always, thank you for your help - and prayers as I have to get this thing working again.

Howdy,

Worst case - pop the drive out of the external caddy and plug it into your PC to see if it will appear. After you power down the PC of course.

Please note that you would need to make sure the jumpers are set correctly (unless it's a SATA drive) to make sure that the drive will get along nicely with any other device you might have on the cable.

If the drive and it's contents show up - you're all good and you've determined that the external case is the most likely problem. External cases are cheap ($39.99 or so)... so no problem getting it back up and running if necessary.

Now - if you're an Apple user... I'll have to defer to one of the many Apple fans on OSP to provide you with help/advice.

As far as brand of HD - this is like the Canon/Nikon debate. I see less Seagates come back through our store than other brands. I do love WD Raptors for gaming systems though! As with all things - your mileage may vary! We sell a lot of the Vantec external HD cases - they're rugged and very reliable.

My first thought would be the enclosure, too. If you have another one, try it. If not, buy one. Even if the first one is OK -- you NEED a backup for your "everything on it" drive. And back it up at least once a day. The enclosures with the button on the front are very convenient for that. I'm thinking of taking the drive out of my Maxtor one and replacing it with a Seagate that's bigger. It voids the warranty but it's 3 years old already.

As far as drives, I've had lots of trouble with Maxtors (but this one with the button has worked well). I only buy Seagate bare drives, now. I haven't had a problem ever -- but I know one of them will die this afternoon because I wrote that. Their bare drives have a 5 year warranty. So if (or, rather, when) it dies, I can get a replacement. And the most I'll lose is one day's worth of work. Unless the backup dies, too. Hmm.

Another thing to do for fewer troubles is to use a UPS with voltage regulation and line conditioning. Things just last longer when you do. And you'll have a UPS, too!

Thanks, I really appreciate it.

Here's what's wierd - I can see the drive, but when I click on it I get an error message telling that the drive is unreadable or corrupt. And, I know I had 25 gigs left available, but the blue circle is full and shows zero bytes available or on the drive. I use a USB 2.0 card and thought maybe the connection is bad. Checked all cables, powered down, rebooted but still the same thing.

Then I thought I had an ugly virus or worm so ran my Adware removal, Spybot and Yahoo Antivirus all in safe mode. Found a few tracking cookies, deleted them. Rebooted and still the same thing. This sounds like a virus (don't know where I could have caught it though). Does this info change the diagnosis?

Could be a virus. And if you can see the drive, then you should at least have a chance of getting some data back. You need to take it to someone who knows what they are doing - and let them know what kind of data you need back from it.

And if a drive has been exhibiting problems of any kind - you shouldn't use it. At the very least you should do a complete reformat of it.

And I have had great luck with Maxtors. I have 5 on my system.