I have a 5 month old external drive, lastnight i noticed the data transfer rates were all over the shot, i left a big amount of data to transfer across usb2 and came home and it had barely done 10mb after 40 mins.

Now i cant get windows to detect the drive over USB in Bios or Disk Management, ive removed the drive from the caddy and plugged it in directly and again it wont recognise the drive in Bios.

I managed to reformat the drive in windows before this started happening.

Just wondering if this is the fault of a corrupted format (somehow?) or whether the drive has just died.

Any ideas?

Theres no such thing as a corrupted format. Your drive is on its last legs. Leave it alone for a bit or bung it in the freezer for a short period to chill, then try reconnecting it and hope you can read it/get the data off.

Could well be just the controller is dying and the drive itself is fine.

I thought so Clocked, ive never heard of a bad format lol

I would agree i think it has an issue with the controller or something, it clicks several times at the start but wont spin up, guess ill just send it back to the manufacturer.

did the external caddy have a fan ?  or some kind of cooling ?


in my experience..... if its not properly cooled external drives die pretty quick :-(

No mate, its a lappy drive, none of those i have seen came with fans built in, only the desktop drive caddies. Im shocked its died so fast tbh

When i get a replacement ill probably give it to a mate and then buy a desktop slot in caddy instead.

plug it in and check for the upperfilters and lowerfilters problem in the registry.  Never had it with a HDD, but Ive had it with CDROM/DVD Drives, Keyboard, mice etc etc.

Surely a registry issue cant be the problem if its not detecting the HDD in the bios?

Sorry, missed that bit!

Might be helpful to some?

I had an external drive that failed - (dropping on floor, cracked the controler - doh!)
So I purchased a new caddy & fitted the old drive, jobs a good-un.

But I wasnt happy with the movement, the new cadddy was a nice aluminium solid case - designed to act as a sink for the drive. But it rattled. So I knew not a good contact with the case.

Removed the drive, and refitted with extra layers of tissue between the drive circuit and case, to make sure the drive case was pressed into contact with the caddy, now theres no rattle and the drive cools poperly.