USB External drive dismounting nightmare

[Samson]

Wow -- two questions at once...

Hi again - Second issue I'm having is with an external hard drive plugged into our server.

I get into work every day, to find the server un-accessible or very slow. I go to the server itself, to see the external USB now has a Red light on it (as compared to a Blue). When I go to log on to the server I have to first click away about 30 error messages saying "Delayed write to F:\$Mft failed data has been lost" etc. F: being the external drive.

I've tried everything from changing the drive path to disabling the write caching/disabled write, yet still ever morning I have to cancel these errror messages, log on, switch the drive off and on before it registers again, only them does server respond normally to clients.

It's frustrating, students have work they save to this drive, and it also stores all my application installs.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks!

[SYNACK]

I assume that there is a compelling reason for having this drive external to the server if it is a shared drive. This setup limits the throughput vastly and problems like this are not uncommon (well haven't heard of the slowdown but have never heard of it as a share solution either so they may be related)

If the external aspect is important for your setup for some reason are you able to switch to an eSATA or firewire drive enclosure as the first is orders of magnitude faster and the second is around double the speed and on a dedicated link.

Better yet is there any way that the drive could be made internal?

The MFT is an NTFS particular file so you could probably get rid of this error and issue by swapping the partition to a FAT32 partition but this would loose file security information for your shared files.

[Samson]

The same problems happened when the disk had a FAT32 filesystem, one of the reasons I converted to NTFS bar the security was to try and stop this happening.

Throughput isn't a massive problem, there isnt constant access to the drive or anything like that.