After much hair tairing and BIOS flashing, RAM switching and swapping, hours
of BIOS settings playing, I noticed that whenever the system booted with the
BIOS changed for Auto on any fsb or memory settings whatsover, before the
system hung the USB external Vantec enclosure drive's light would flicker
and go out. This is an eSATA unit but I had it hooked with USB 2.0
connector. I yanked the cable, set the fsb at 390 and the vcore up at 2.5000
and it has been rock solid in Orthos for over an hour. Very strange. I've
never heard of run in to this particular quirk before. The external drive
would be the last thing I would think of.
>I noticed that whenever the system booted with the BIOS changed for Auto on
>any fsb or memory settings whatsover, before the system hung the USB
>external Vantec enclosure drive's light would flicker
Sorry, that's unclear and sloppy: It should read: "..whenever the system
booted with the BIOS settings for FSB changed from Auto to manual, I
noticed that the when the system hung and rebooted, the external Vantec USB
drive light would flicker and go out."
I've had a time myself trying to find a USB 2.5" IDE enclosure for my
laptop HD that will agree with my Gigabyte K8NS-939 nforce 3. One of the
rejects was a Vantec. Gigabyte support gave me some nforce 4 drivers,
which improved things alot. But still, I have to make sure that trash
bin has released the drive's partitions or problems happen when I want
to remove the drive or shut down windows, with my present Cooler Master
enclosure. Tomorrow I'll be trying an Icy Dock. My 3.5" Bytecc
enclosure has no such problems; neither do my thumb drives.
I just got my Icy Dock MB448UA enclosure and have begun to test it, but
I must run into town. It's interface is 30 Mb/s. Windows has set it to
write cacheing, no choice available, and trash bin off, no choice to
activate. I think this bodes well, but will test its abilities to not
crash things on shutdown later.
They offer a dock that goes in an external 3.5" bay and lets you slide
in the portable usb enclosure and use it on IDE! Wow. The back of the
portable has an indented connector for IDE.
Nice that the enclosure is aluminum and contacts the top of the drive.
No shock mounting grommets for the HD, though.
---
Ed Light
The Icy Dock solved all my problems. It's as if the chipsets in the
other ones weren't programmed to clearly identify themselves as
removable. My advice is to ditch the Vantec and get the Icy Dock MB448UA
at newegg. Right now there's a $10 rebate so it will only be about $17.
Nuts. It still has one issue. You have to plug it in *after* booting or
it won't disconnect for minutes, and shutting down Windows to clear it
takes ages.
Must be the motherboard.
However, so far, if you plug it in after booting it's fine.
Ed Light wrote:
> Windows has set it to
> write cacheing, no choice available, and trash bin off, no choice to
> activate.
That was my new XP install and I hadn't changed trash bin from the
global setting, so the setting for the USB drive was greyed out. Oops.
It does see it.
Gigabyte EP35-DSR3 issues solved 
Linear Mode
