Longer Cable wont work with Hard Drive

[ramsdaro]

Hello everyone, first i would like to say hello to all, this is my first post.

I am however having problems with my external hard drive, it is a kaser storage vault, 160gb. the drive worked fine on xp, i got a new laptop with vista, and have been having problems since. I formatted the drive, and i did error-checking. i have no idea what is wrong with it. Vista recognizes the drive, it is just extremely slow. right now i am copying a 209mb file to it. it is telling me it will be 1 day and 8 hours. its at 1.6 kb/s. this obviously is unacceptable. i do not know what might be wrong with the drive, i think its fine, just something with the compatibility.

thanks to all who read and all that respond,
Robert.

 

[ramsdaro]

fixed it, i always wondered in the back of my mind if this might be the problem, i have been trying for over 2 weeks now to fix this. well i finally did. i just got my laptop, with a printer. the printer cable was about 6ft. my external drive cable is about 2 ft. i wanted a longer one so that i could move kinda freely with my laptop and not have to stay within 2ft from the drive. so i switched the cable. i finally decided i would just try it. the printer cable obviously cannot send the data as fast as the external drive. so beaware anyone else. haha, i feel so stupid right now, but i dont even care. i dont have to buy another $120 hard drive .haha.
thank you for reading haha

 

[ramsdaro]

I just got a cable off ebay for $4 its a 9ft 2.0 USB cable, and i was wondering why this cable is not working with my external hard drive. when i click my computer to open the drive, the window freezes, and i have to turn off the drive. i was wondering why this cable isnt working what i could do to fix it? thanks
heres the specs of it.

USB 2.0 A to B Cable 9.5 Feet Long

Features:
Standard USB Cable
9.5 Feet Long (114 inches)
A to B type - Male to Male connector

 

[darkstar782]

Because the longer the cable is the more the signal degrades along it. If it degrades too much, the computer looses sync with the device, or has to retransmit data.

It also depends on the amount of Electromagnetic interference in the room, the quality of the cable and shielding, and if you are running at USB 2.0 480Mb/s speeds or USB 1.1 12Mb/s speeds.

How about two shorter cables and a hub?

 

[chuckshissle]

USB cable are not that fast to start with. You're better off with a network storage as to external USB storage with 9 ft cable.

 

[hell_spawn]

scrap your extrenal and purchase the D-Link DNS-323..... It's a wonderful thing.... FTP access, Gb ethernet.. supports, mirroring striping, spanning, JBOD... I threw 2 500GB SATA drives in there and now I have 1TB of data ready for me anywhere I go.. I am actually looking at buying another one and sticking 2 1TB drives into it. bringing my total storage up to 3TB mawahahahaha

sorry I know this was way off topic but there is a point... I bought a external USB a couple of weeks ago and was very dissapointed with the speed... USB sucks for speed. so then I picked up my NAS and was like "SHAZAMM" *changes underware*. FTP was a huge plus now I dont need a external I can just FTP into my box from anywhere in the world.... but if you do need a external drive get a eSATA case.... at the bare min firewire.

 

[ramsdaro]

i am actually getting a hub. will have a 2ft from drive to the hub, and i would like a 6ft to the computer from the hub. would that be any better? or a waste of money. i need about 6 ft from the hub, so i can move my laptop from one end of the bed to the other basically, thats all i need.

 

[darkstar782]

Sounds better, try for a decent cable rather than one of the really really thin unshielded ones....

And make sure the hub is USB2.0 not 1.1!

 

[Guest]

I had trouble for months with my Maxtor external hard drive with my pc sometimes taking ages to detect it and files getting corrupted. Finally out of desperation I replaced the usb cable with one I had lying around and hey presto, the drive is working perfectly now. The cable I'm using now is much shorter than the original. Don't think there was anything wrong with the old cable, just too long!

 

[jmcefai]

A very common problem, usb cables are not meant for long distances - even if some manufacturers make long cables. The solution? get a long network cable (cat5/6) to cover the distance needed and then buy a "usb over cat" - search for that in Google.

with such setup you will have usb terminals but the data is passed trough a network cable of which signal does not degrade as much as usb.

good luck