[Phainein Terra]

Exactly as the title says. Frequently when I try to transfer a file over ~100 MB to my new external harddrive it freezes up. It is a Hammer 500GB USB External with it's own power source, formatted NTFS (like my internal HD). I really only bought it to store big files on and it's really annoying when it locks up 75% of the time I transfer those big files onto it. My OS is Windows Xp Pro. This occured and occurs before and after a complete reformat/reinstall of my operating system. I tried to run a diagnostic tool on it but the diagnostic itself locked the dang thing up! I am just not familiar with issues like this and don't have a clue where to start to find out what the problem is. Did I just acquire a really crappy external?

[Megabite]

Does it lock up if you transfer the files from the External HD to your internal one?

Are you using the USB ports at the back of the Tower?

Have you installed all the divers for the PC like Motherboard drivers?

[Phainein Terra]

Sorry for taking so long to respond. I've been working far too much overtime lately and have had very little time to work more on this problem.

I do think it's a usb port driver issue, and the reason is because my computer also locks up when I try to navigate/transfer a lot of files from my digital camera too. I haven't tried my cellphone yet but I bet it would be the same thing. It seems to have trouble handling large transfer through usb-connected media devices.

Here may be a stupid question. I updated my motherboard drivers but that didn't fix my problem. Is there USB driver for my operating system? (Windows XP Professional) If there is, you'd think my automated updates would have fixed it if my usb driver is out of date. Wouldn't it?

Addendum: I just tested this out with a new San Disk 4GB Flash Drive I bought. It had better performance than my external HD but that could be because it's faster. It still locked up trying to transfer a 2.5Gb file but not smaller 100-200mb files like the big external HD does.