External hard drives have become very popular in recent years due to data storage increase from end users. End users mostly use there external hard drive for photos, videos, songs and more. Also, the process of adding an additional internal hard drive is more difficult than an external hard drive because of the internal connections required. Therefore, there has been a significant increase in the usage of external hard drives.
EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE PROBLEMS
All internal and external drives are prone for failure. Here are some reasons that external drive failures may occur:
- Dropped the hard drive- With external hard drive being portable, there has been an increase in incidents of drives being dropped during transportation. This can cause the drives internal components to become damaged and render the drive unusable
- Hard Drive falls from a surface- Many external drives fall from a desk, table or work area due to the drive being to close to the edge of the surface. Also drives that are designed to sit upright on a surface are prone to tipping over the external drive. It is a good idea to make sure that you external hard drive is laying flat on a surface and that it is away from any edge that could cause the drive to be knocked over.
- Spaghetti mess of cables- Excess cabling from the drive should be properly pulled out of the way so that your hands and feet do not get tangled in the cords and pull your external drive off its surface to the ground.
- Using the wrong power cord- People usually can make the mistake of plugging in the wrong power adapter to there external drive which causes a power surge, which can overheat the drive. When plugging in your external drive check to make sure you have the proper power cord for your external hard drive.
COMMON EXTERNAL DRIVE ERROR MESSAGES/SYMPTONS
- delayed write fail
- external hard drive crashed
- external hard drive noise
- external hard drive corrupted ask to be formatted
- external hard drive not recognized in OS
- drive stopped working
- input/output error
- drive does not power up
October 14th, 2008 on 9:39 am
This was very helpful. I didn’t know that pluging in the wrong power cord would cause a problem. After reading this I checked both my externals and sure enough I have 2 power cords with the same plug but rated for differnt voltage. If I would not of read this I know somewhere in the future I would of pluged the wrong cord into the wrong external. Thanks for saving my butt.