Mark Twain wrote:
I keep all the Mrimg's on the external HD''s

The 780 is a backup so I don't have any large
files on it.

Should I run chkdsk?


Robert

Are you getting any Click Of Death from this thing ?

That's when the drive tries to reset itself, and it
bangs the heads against the stop.

On quiet drives, this can give a "tiny click" noise.
And that's a sign it's having trouble reading stuff
off the platters.

I can't find any data of note, about that external.
Including, how hard is it to take the enclosure apart.

*******

To make a test file on your internal drive, is "easy".
It just about killed me :-)

It appears they changed the behavior of one of the Windows
commands I used previously for this.

Open an administrator Command Prompt. In Windows 7
type "cmd" into the search box, and for the top-most
item returned, right-click that item and select
Run As Administrator.

Now, the command I'm about to show, I don't think it
always needed administrator for this.

First, in the Command Prompt, we need a place on the
internal drive to store the test file. Here, I've selected
your Downloads folder to be the holder of the file. In
this case, the test file is roughly 10GB. The command doesn't
accept shorthands like some commands do, for size.

cd /d %userprofile%\Downloads

fsutil file createnew my_new_test_file.bin 10485760000

Now, that command appears to make a file virtually instantly
on the drive. Go to your downloads folder, and check the
properties of the new file. It should show a size of
approximately 10GB.

Now you can copy that file (in File Explorer) to the external drive,
and see if it accepts the operation. The disk light really
shouldn't flash for the source drive for that file, but
the LED for the external drive should flash. Because
the writes to the external drive should be real.

What I can't figure out, is how the computer is making
that zero-containing file. It has all the earmarks of
being a Sparse file. And one of the reasons in the past
that I didn't like that fsutil command, is the file it
created was sparse. What's weird is, if I check the
Attributes right now, it's 0x20, which is the "archived"
attribute and perfectly normal looking. For all the world,
the file the fsutil created, behaves just like a Sparse
file would.

Anyway, little puzzles aside, the "fsutil" command,
a command provided in Windows, has a way to make a
large file for test purposes. And it can make the
file in no time at all. Copying the file, however,
takes time to do, and that's what we want for testing.
Is to see the external drive working out, and
not "conking out".

Paul