Problem copying to USB 2TB HDD

Help & Support
1

A friend has asked me to copy a bunch of my stuff over to her brand new 2TB Buffalo USB HDD, but it's proving a nightmare if I want to use DOpus - which, naturally, I do - regardless of what buffer size I try. There is a (toggle) utility that comes with the USB HDD (Turbo Copy) and that works fine with Explorer (replaces the Explorer dialog) but it doesn't "happen" with DOpus. OTOH, DOpus copies to and from my 3TB Hitachi USB HDD without a problem - very fast - so the problem is obviously related to the Buffalo drive.

I am resigned to not using DOpus for this exercise, but I'm curious to know if anyone has a reason for why this is happening in both Explorer (with the BUffalo Turbo option toggled off) and DOpus:

The files I am transferring are all MKV, varying from .5 to 2GB. Yesterday I left the copying unattended and it took 12-18 hours to transfer about 300GB. Today I experimented, moving a few files one at a time to establish what was happening. It's very odd - a file will pelt along at about 45-50kbs (up to 110) then start to slow down after 500MB or so, to 10kbs, or so then stall completely at the end, although the two file sizes read the same. i.e. the copy does not move on to the next file. I can neither cancel, skip nor abort (in either Explorer or DOpus) and have to CAD out of the copy. After having done so, the copy is intact and functional on the receiving drive. So, it seems that the file managers are not finishing off the copy in some way.

Has anyone else come across this?

Robin

2

If you drag files to the drive using the right mouse button, do you get any extra copy options in the menu that appears? (Try holding shift when you drag as well.)

If not, you could try using this button which makes Opus copy files via the Windows shell.

But it sounds to me like the drive is faulty if it cannot accept a long file copy, even from Windows Explorer itself, without you having to use custom "turbo" software provided by the drive. Harddrives should "just work".

It's possible there are other factors, like anti-virus getting in the way, but I'd expect that to cause the same problem with both drives, not just the Buffalo one, so that seems unlikely.

3

Thanks Leo - I'll try that. Very annoying this thing generally. I have just started the last folder copy to the Buffalo drive and according to the pathetic dialogue the copy of 430GB will take 1 day and 3 hours. This Buffalo Drive actually replaced the first one my friend bought, which ceased to function after a few days. (Our local store only stocks these drives.) I did not have any problems copying to the first drive and it certainly didn't take me 4 days to copy 1TB. I think I'll just tell my mate to return the thing and get her to buy some other brand.