USB acting funny? Check out power supply

Former user wrote on 5/27/2009, 11:19 AM

We have been having a rash of USB problems with external drives. It seems the USB port would have a lot of garbage causing loss of data and appear the drive was malfunctioning.

We have determined that is the power supply going bad. Once we replaced/fixed it, everything cleared up.

Just wanted to pass along in case you run into this issue and think your drive is dying. It is usually a cap in the ps if you are electronically inclined.

Dave T2

Comments

TLF wrote on 5/27/2009, 11:26 AM

Thanks for that. My external drive has been acting up - delayed write fails, USB device not recognised, failure to detect, etc - so I'll give the power supply idea a try.

Former user wrote on 5/27/2009, 11:36 AM

Yeah, that sounds like the type of symptoms we were having.

Hope it helps.

Dave T2

musicvid10 wrote on 5/27/2009, 11:45 AM

A good idea if you are running port-powered devices like portable hard drives is to use a powered USB hub.

The ports on your motherboard / card are only required to provide 500 ma. If your splitting them through non-powered hubs, you can diminish that pretty quickly.

Tom Pauncz wrote on 5/27/2009, 12:04 PM

I have a bunch of external FW drives - LaCie D2s - and have experienced similar issues. Once I swapped the power supply between two drives, problems disappeared.

So, this is not just a USB drive issue.

Tom

Former user wrote on 5/27/2009, 12:23 PM

Tom,
I haven't experienced it with firewire yet, but good to know.

Dave T2

richard-courtney wrote on 5/28/2009, 6:43 AM

Would this cause "not found" issues with memory sticks that plug into USB port?