Odd behaviour external hard drive

I have been running my 250 GB diamondmax HD in a vantec nexstar 350UF enclosure for 2 months now through USB and it has been great, snappy response and no trouble. I finally picked up a 6 pin to 4 pin firewire cable and tried using firewire connection on my notebook. After opening the drive under My Computer the drive hung and the system seemed to freeze for about a minute before allowing me access - afterwards it worked fine. This had never happened before.

I shut it down and tried the drive with USB - now it did the same thing! All successive times with either firewire or USB do the same thing. When I open windows task manager first before turning the drive on I could see that the memory usage for explorer.exe jumped from about 25 k to 299 k in seconds, and the CPU activity went to 100%. There is no drive activity for most of the minute, just peaked CPU activity, and about 5-10 seconds before the CPU and memory drop to normal the external drive spins up and so does my internal drive.

This happens whether the drive was plugged in and on after a cold shutdown or when activated after the laptop turned on. If I wait a while between use, the same effect occurs - not sure how long between uses. It does NOT happen to my external USB 2.5" drive. I tried flashing an upgrade for the nexstar firmware, but no difference. I removed and reinstalled USB drivers, no change. I've searched and searched for similar cases but nothing!

I'm stumped. It is related to the powering down of the drive, but why the sudden change in behaviour? A short delay of a few seconds fine, but for a whole minute - crazy! I need to try the drive on another computer, but can't do that at the moment. Anything anyone could add would be appreciated.

Chef

 

Have you plugged the HDD into the mains, power from USB is probably not enough.

Also, you could try plugging in the HDD, but dont open the drive from My Computer. Instead, just run a virus and spyware scan on the drive, by selecting the drive from within the AV program.

 

It's a 3.5" drive, so it has it's own power supply. It's definitely not a virus issue, seems to be some sort of power management or driver issue causing the drive to flood my laptop's memory with data, requiring all my laptop's processing ability to do it. My page file usage does not increase.

 

So no one else has a clue? This is certainly odd behaviour, especially since it was sudden.

 

Have you removed the firewire driver? what was the firewire specs *speedwise* for the drive and what firewire specs on your pc? the same? Have you attempted to hook this drive to another machine that doesn't/never had/have the drivers loaded (xp does not need drivers, or usb drivers for that matter SP1/SP2) and seen the response time? I can understand the explorer.exe spike and cpu going up to 100% since when you plug the drive in, it has to initialize, install, check partition, ect. -

 

I can understand the spike - just not that it lasts for a full minute, essentially nearly locking up the system for this time. Plus the fact that it never used to do this, only after the first time I plugged into the firewire connection. Previously after plugging into USB there was only a few second delay before I could use it. I have a second exterbal drive (USB only) that does not do this.


Actually I didn't remove the firewire driver, I'll try that. I wonder if somehow activating the driver changed something else in the system about how it reads this drive? I also have not had the opportunity to try plugging it into another system yet.