External WD drive doesn't like internal WD drive

[DrRinse]

I used to have 2 WD external drives and and an old internal WD SATA-1 drive. It was 8 years old so I decided to retire it and clone it to the faster WDC WD50 00BEKT-75KA9 7200rpm 500GB drive. However, prior to this when I had both externals hooked up, they would work for a short time and then the smaller WD 3200BEVT 22ZCTO 320GB 5400 RPM would stop working. It would click regularly, the access LED would dim and brighten in time to the click and the drive would disappear from explorer. I also find that if I put the USB cable into the immediate top right USB slot on the mainboard, it fails straight away.
My machine is a Phenom quad core 9660, Asus M2N-32 SLI Deluxe board, NViidia Ge-Force GTX 275, Zalman cooler, latest BIOS, Latest Windows 7 updates, Kaspersky Internet Security 2014, 6GB of Corsair 400MHz DDR2 matched RAM.

Any suggestions, please? I also have a PCI Express 1 4 port USB card.

Thanks

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Are the external drives powered through a wall adapter or through USB?

 

[DrRinse]

Are the external drives powered through a wall adapter or through USB?

Through the USB ports

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

You should either attempt to power them externally, or ensure you are using separate controllers. A single USB controller may not be able to provide enough current to drive more than a single external hard drive. As for the one drive disliking another, there's no way one drive even knows what other hard drives you have installed and currently connected.

A drive clicking is usually a byproduct of the drive parking it's head mechanism, which may very well be an indication of the drive losing power.

 

[DrRinse]

OK, I will try plugging it into the PCI-E x1 4-port VIA USB eXtensible USB controller. I have a 950W supply. Surely this is enough to power it?

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Your power supply is irrelevant. Each USB controller has a limited amount of current it can supply to the ports attached to it, and all devices attached to those ports have to share that current. If your drives can be powered externally, it may be worth doing so.

 

[DrRinse]

Hmm. Even if the PCI-E controller is separate to the onboard one?

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

The add-in board based ports will have their own power, separate from the USB ports supplied on the motherboard. So, you could run one external drive from the motherboard, another from the add-in board.