Brennan’s Blog

A word to the wise, do not use a USB drive enclosure. It is fundamentally flawed and I will explain why.

So, I am having one of those days. Nothing seems to be working as it should. I read blogs via Rojo.com which has been flaky as usual but lately it has been offline a lot lately as they have added more "features" which only serve to make it suck more and more with each release. I am also using MSDN heavily lately and some of the documentation pages on there cause a Server 500 error. It normally goes away after a while but it is persisting today. It is annoying because the problem is becoming more frequent. It has been buggy ever since they added the new community content wiki. So anyway, I had to get to the MSDN documentation in another way.

Fortunately I have copies of the MSDN library locally and I have copied all of my MSDN downloads to my new Metal GearBox II drive enclosure. That is proving to be a big mistake. While I was able to copy the files to the drive from my nice FireWire drive enclosure it is not possible to copy the files off of it. It seems the USB connection dies after a certain point. I knew that USB was not designed to sustain a consistent transfer speed but I did not expect the drive to fail in the middle of copying a file. So I will have to remember that I have to keep all files on that drive under 300mb or they are just lost forever. My guess is that as more data is transfered it reaches a point where the buffer becomes full and cannot flush itself fast enough and then the driver completely fails and Windows drops the drive. I briefly considered a means of copying the file off the drive, like writing a "slow copy" utility which would copy 100mb at a time and then sleep for a few seconds to allow the drive to settle before grabbing another 100mb. But I decided to download a newer copy of the MSDN library to my fully functional FireWire drive enclosure.

Perhaps while that is downloading I create create that "slow copy" utility. I have an hour left.