[JGZinv]

Alrighty...

I have 3 external Western Digital media center hard drives.
These have twin USB 2 ports and a single Firewire port for connections.

They are hooked up to a Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook, which has
(4) USB 2 slots and one mini FW port.

The drives are typically set up one on FW and the others on USB.

The first one I purchased some time ago and is a 160 GB unit.
Typically that's the FW drive, but I've switched it back and forth to USB
due to moving things around lately. Noticed no performance issues.
Since picking it up it's ran just fine. It's a WD1600B011.

The other two drives are July '06 units, 320 GB ea. Same style/model group and it
would appear software, other than the company logo's been updated on the housing.
Both are WD3200B011's.

Now to the problem -
Up until this last week, I've had one 320 and the 160 hooked up only.
The 320 is just one big partition, the 160 is in three parts.
Since about January the 320 has been giving me problems such as...

Odd shut down/start up pattern (not the usual).
It will sometimes constantly sit and run/click/spin or act like it is seeking data - which
often will cause the computer and any applications (even those unrelated to that drive) to slow down or freeze.
Even when hooked up, it will arbitrarily disconnect itself and disappear from My Computer.
Sometimes when starting the computer - it will not show up; to fix this and the previous
issue you have to cycle the drive's power.
Sometimes you can't even get it to turn back on with the power button after one of these "episodes"
it has to have the power cord removed then reinserted... then it will fire up.

So I've pretty much resolved myself to turning it in to WD support and getting a new one.

Now, besides that - I of course have to get my data off it - so I'm trying to use the second 320 as the backup.
Being that I need to make a backup of the 160 GB drive too - I figured that I would partition this backup drive 4 ways.

After trying a pair of programs off the net to partition it, which either couldn't do anything at all or they would
only partition a 49 GB section... I finally went and got Partition Magic 8 Portable.

When I went to make the 2nd of the 4 partitions - it came up with an error in the creation process and left me
with unallocated space. Doing the process one at a time manually finished the creation of the 4 partitions successfully.
Which for reference are 155, 100, 37, 18 GB.

Now after getting it set up, the drive is starting to exhibit similar symptoms to the other 320 unit...

Frequent running/noises and slowing/freezing Windows XP at times until the drive is turned off.
(In fact, right now the second unit sounds like it's spun up and makes a hard click about every 9 seconds.
The original 320 has a noticeable whir, but not uncommon for a multiplatter drive. The 160 GB unit
is basically dead silent and almost no spin vibration to it at all.)

The original 160 GB unit still is running strong and has yet to give me problems, but I don't feel that
it's wise to make this backup if the "backup unit" is already getting irritable and there's not a single file on
it yet. I've ran 2-3 versions of WD's drive recovery diagnostic/support inspection tool... it can't find anything wrong on any
of the drives. I've switched between Firewire and USB to see if that had any effect on the problem - nothing.
The drivers are up to date as far as I can tell for both the PC and the drives. All the drives are plugged into the same
power strip, so it's not "dirty" power causing fluctuations.

So I'm pretty much at my wit's end with these things,  I know my way around a PC's organs - but
this is getting beyond me. The only common factor seems to be the software and model of the two new units.
I've scanned with 4 sets of antivirus/spyware tools - to make sure I don't have a single piece of oddball
software or a virus causing this...

So any ideas? I'm fresh out.

[Descenterace]

Software? What software do you need for an external hard disk? You plug it in and it just works.

Unless you use Win98, of course.

[JGZinv]

The software is a combination of a WD drive system tray de-mounter, the drivers, Retospect Backup,
and probably some other stuff on the included CD.

It all installs at once, so you're not able to pick and choose what you want.

[Descenterace]

Well, unless you need the backup app (and there are doubtless better apps out there available for free; Windows' own one isn't bad for home use) you don't need any of that stuff installed.

Unnecessary drivers are typically written just to establish a 'presence' on the user's computer. It's a marketing and advertising thing, nothing more, and usually those 'drivers' are crap.

If those external drives are anything like other USB external drives, you can uninstall the crap software they came with and they'll still work. In fact, if the problem is what I think it is, they'll work better.

It's like monitor drivers. They serve no purpose. Hell, I once bought a cheap power supply and it had a DRIVER CD. WTF? What kind of drivers can a cheap, basic ATX power supply require?!

[jr2]

Special ones.  :-0 Look in awe and wonder at their driver!

[S-99]

Hmmmm, yes. When you buy a laptop, you say **** all that **** dell, compaq, or hp gave me, and then you format the thing, partition the drive the way you want it, and use the factory supplied windows disk or other os you want to install and install.

Pretty much what i'm saying is **** the wd software that thing comes with. I've used it before and quite frankly it's only real useful feature is the data relocation function. You have data on one partition, it'll move that data to another location for you enmasse with big ease. **** the wd driver, why do you need that? Windows xp and higher has default support for drives of capacity larger that 127gb's. Just format the damn drive the way you want it, and make sure to get rid of any wd installed software as well too, it's quite unnecessary. Windows and linux have enough tools to deal with hard drives and mobile storage on their own, not to mention mounting them, and even proper removal for mobile storage (that safe removal function ring a bell?).

That's my rant on the situation, from my own personal experience having 240gb's of wd storage at my disposal, they work damn fine. And of course the external drive is probably the same damn model as my 160gb just housed outside of the computer and connectable with a usb cable. My 160 caviar and 80 caviar all work as expected. The only time i ever had problems was when i had a large partition (130gb's) formatted to ntfs, that's when **** started going down the crapper. Idk, select your file systems wisely mainly, partition sizes don't seem to matter too much unless you did something like i did with ntfs (lost all my data twice to ntfs on my 130gb partition). However from your explanation it sounds like going to tech support was a good idea, it sounds like a ****ed up enough problem to warrant doing so, and probably a very small chance that you didn't need to(you messed around with the damn drive enough sounds like a tech problem for sure).

[JGZinv]

Well since WD offers the options of paying to get drives sent out ahead of time,
I may just take that route and have a new pair sent out, transfer the data, but not install
their software.

Overall, the software isn't per say bad, Retrospect (which is from another company I realize)
does most of what you want it to. The WD tray thing though is a pain in the rear... even when
you want to dismount the drives from Windows - it always complains that they are in use or can't
be taken off right now... so you have to shut them off anyway... i.e. it's useless.

The power problem is definitely indicative of something else going bad... like a start up capacitor.

Since the WD software pack sets up all the drives as "media center" USB hubs (there's a USB port on the front
of each) I suppose it's possible that the drivers simply don't like to play together when there's more than
one of itself installed. I'm not even daisy chaining the devices via USB or Firewire, so if removing the software
causes me to loose a port for some reason, it wont be a concern.

As to Dell, oh yes that was such fun. I tried getting them to send me the OS backup that they no longer include
for free. After 16 hand-off's to other support reps, 3 shipments of CDs... each different or wrong. I finally quit trying.
So their little partition is still on here, but it's small enough that I don't really care about it and in case of utter disaster
while traveling it "might" have a use... 

[jr2]

I think you can get rid of that partition using either the software installed with the computer, there should be an option labeled "remove recovery partition" or similar (there was on the HP that I did it on).  Try Googling it.

As far as external Hard Disks go, I bought an internal one for a hundred bucks and a drive enclosure for 30 ta-da!  Still works fine... all 279 NTFS Gigs of it!

[JGZinv]

Oh I know how to get rid of it... particularly even if I wanted to just use
Partition Magic. But it's not a large enough problem for me to worry over, so
I'll let it sit.

As it goes... "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It!" 

[G0atmaster]

If the trouble is in partitioning a blank 320-gig drive, just make sure it's plugged in, rightclick on my computer, go to "manage," click on "storage drives" or something like that, you should be able to find all your harddrives on that.  From there, it's easy to partition drives.