External hard drive causes XP freeze
 

I had an extra SATA drive, so I bought an external drive enclosure for it.
I use it to back up files. But when I do anything that requires a lot of
I/O activity, like running MSBackup on 35 gigs of files or Disk
Defragmenter, the entire computer locks up completely. It just freezes in
the middle of whatever it was doing, and I have to hit the reset button.

Any idea what might be causing this? Thanks.

External hard drive causes XP freeze
 

Sounds like a compatibility/driver problem. I buy Western Digital or Maxtor
external drives, they always work without problems since they are complete
with complex driver installs and utilities. You should try another hard
drive with your enclosure to see if that solves the problem, oh and make sure
the drive is formatted NTFS.

"Hiawatha Bray" wrote:

I had an extra SATA drive, so I bought an external drive enclosure for it.
I use it to back up files. But when I do anything that requires a lot of
I/O activity, like running MSBackup on 35 gigs of files or Disk
Defragmenter, the entire computer locks up completely. It just freezes in
the middle of whatever it was doing, and I have to hit the reset button.

Any idea what might be causing this? Thanks.