doveman

Yep, it's this Orico one, which the reviews suggest is quite good and reliable http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00BH83LYG/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Yep, exactly like that. Never seen a split plug like that before but as you've posted a picture of it, I assume it is standard after all? If that's the case, I can probably get him another one to try quite cheaply, once he's tested it on another PC to confirm it isn't just his PC, which I'd be very surprised by as the USB ports seem to be working fine for everything else. I suppose it's possible the HDD has come a bit loose from the internal connector in the caddy but I don't suppose it would be spinning up if that was the case, so that's probably unlikely.

Thanks. I use Avast but I'll try uninstalling it, see if chkdsk then works and then reinstall it. I don't actually need to chkdsk the SSD at the moment as I managed to do so by booting into Windows installed on my HDD but it would be nice to fix the problem so this isn't necessary in future.

Here you go. I accidentally chopped a bit off the right-side when taking the photo but I think it's not important.

Just today I've been trying to play Arma3 and at random times, sometimes when I've alt-tabbed out of the game, my screen goes into standby as if there's no signal coming from the PC. I can still hear people talking on Teamspeak but wierd artificats happen to their speech and they can't hear me. Hard-rebooting doesn't work and the screen doesn't come on at POST, even turning it off and on again with the motherboard switch doesn't help, only turning off and on the PSU gets it working again. I used to use Razer Surround fine but now when I install it, I cannot hear anyone in TeamSpeak3. Sometimes the Razer Surround calibration/test program doesn't even produce any soon. So I set the default devices back to the onboard Realtek and was at least able to play Arma3 and use TS3 but I've been getting these crashes. They may not be caused by Razer Surround but I've found these errors in the logs: Faulting application name: RzMaelstromVADStreamingService.exe, version: 1.1.49.1641, time stamp: 0x528dd945 Faulting module name: RzMaelstromVADStreamingService.exe, version: 1.1.49.1641, time stamp: 0x528dd945 Exception code: 0xc0000417 Fault offset: 0x00000000002ec80c Faulting process id: 0xbe8 Faulting application start time: 0x01cf0d8647fbda55 Faulting application path: C:\ProgramData\Razer\Synapse\Devices\Razer Surround\Driver\RzMaelstromVADStreamingService.exe Faulting module path: C:\ProgramData\Razer\Synapse\Devices\Razer Surround\Driver\RzMaelstromVADStreamingService.exe Report Id: dcac7e10-7979-11e3-b2d7-8c89a563ffda Faulting application name: RzSynapse.exe, version: 1.16.6.17931, time stamp: 0x52899215 Faulting module name: RazerConfigNative.dll, version: 2.20.28.0, time stamp: 0x52aee07c Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x001c0252 Faulting process id: 0x470 Faulting application start time: 0x01cf0d86480cf163 Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Razer\Synapse\RzSynapse.exe Faulting module path: C:\ProgramData\Razer\Synapse\Devices\RazerConfigNative.dll Report Id: 8cd8252f-7979-11e3-b2d7-8c89a563ffda Application: RzSynapse.exe Framework Version: v4.0.30319 Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception. Exception Info: System.AccessViolationException Stack: at MS.Win32.UnsafeNativeMethods.DispatchMessage(System.Windows.Interop.MSG ByRef) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrameImpl(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.PushFrame(System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherFrame) at System.Windows.Threading.Dispatcher.Run() at System.Windows.Application.RunDispatcher(System.Object) at System.Windows.Application.RunInternal(System.Windows.Window) at System.Windows.Application.Run(System.Windows.Window) at Razer.Emily.UI.SynapseApp.Run() at Razer.Emily.UI.AppEntryPoint.Main(System.String[]) There's some other unrelated to Razer as well: Faulting application name: svchost.exe_swprv, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bc3c1 Faulting module name: swprv.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5be06d Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x0000000000039fc7 Faulting process id: 0x1494 Faulting application start time: 0x01cf0d86aa2f5b72 Faulting application path: C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe Faulting module path: c:\windows\system32\swprv.dll Report Id: f375ef7f-7979-11e3-b2d7-8c89a563ffda Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Error calling a routine on a Shadow Copy Provider {b5946137-7b9f-4925-af80-51abd60b20d5}. Routine details EndPrepareSnapshots({71fa97ff-f793-4085-8ec1-f8f9795b8fa0}) [hr = 0x800706be, The remote procedure call failed. ]. Operation: Executing Asynchronous Operation Context: Current State: DoSnapshotSet Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://www.mysql.com. Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://www.mysql.com. Unknown/unsupported storage engine: INNODB For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://www.mysql.com. The description for Event ID 11 from source RAMDiskVE cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer. If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event. The following information was included with the event: Failed to read configuration information from registry. I'm also unable to chkdsk my new SSD as when rebooting to do it, it says it can't because of something that was recently installed and I should uninstall it but it doesn't specify what this is and I have no idea (it's not Razer Surround/Synapse as this has happened with it uninstalled).

When I try and run chkdsk on my new SSD, when it reboots to do it, it says it can't due to a recent install of something and that I should uninstall it but I have no idea what it's talking about! Have you got any ideas how to fix this?

I don't think he can as the caddy has a non-standard connector on it (well I've never seen one like it before anyway) but certainly that cable worked fine when I tested it before Christmas.

I bought my brother a USB3 caddy and put a 500GB Samsung 2.5" HDD in it for Christmas and it worked fine on my PC and I copied a few files to it for him. I've just been on the phone to him to show him how to use it (over TeamViewer) and his PC, running Win7 x64, isn't registering the drive at all, although he says it's powering up and whirring away. I tried rebooting, getting him to plug it directly into both the USB3 port on the back and the USB2 ports on the front without using the USB3 extension cable I bought him. Only once, when using the extension cable, did I see an Unknown Device in Device Manager but that's all. I also checked Computer Management - Disk Management, the Windows logs and with BootICE to check it wasn't hidden or something but it didn't show in that either. I know the obvious thing to try first is connecting it to another PC, so I've told him to do that when he gets a chance but in the meantime, has anyone got any ideas why it isn't working?

OK, I'm somewhat reassured if you think the results look normal However, the USB3 drive is actually a Samsung 500GB SATA drive in a SATA->USB3 enclosure and I've had it connected previously both as straight SATA and e-SATA (which are essentially the same thing) and the curve looks much the same there with those as well (in fact, even more smooth), so it's not the USB interface that's producing better results than the internal drives, nor is the USB capping the throughput really as the results from all three different connection methods are pretty much the same. This is e-sata, where the Burst rate is somewhat lower than both SATA and USB3 but that's probably just an anomaly. and this SATA For the WD and Samsung 2TB drives (with Windows on the SSD) I did start the test a few times on both it looked the same each time at the start, so there was no point letting the test run to the end. It just seems strange that the WD 2TB and Samsung 2TB 3.5" drives would be up and down all over the place, whilst the Samsung 500GB 2.5" has a nice smooth downward curve. This is the SSD running Windows. I'll have to re-do it with Windows running from the HDD, which is easy enough as I still have it installed on the Samsung, to see how it compares. I've got a couple of Windows installations on the HDD, so I'll check which is the "cleanest" and then disable as much as possible to test again to see if it makes any difference.

Sure but maybe killing anything unneeded with Task Manager would be just as good and perhaps a bit easier (depends on whether you already have a PE with the drivers installed or if you have to spend time building it). It's probably also important to test with the drivers you're actually using in your normal OS, as testing with different drivers in PE could return a good result but the proper OS drivers might not behave the same, so you could be assuming that it's all functioning as well as it should be when it's not.

OK, well those conditions are a bit beyond the average user (including myself), so how are we meant to benchmark a drive and check it's operating normally? None of the HDDs are the system drive now I've got a SSD, the temp files go onto a RAMdisk and the only pagefile is on the SSD (which I normally disable as well but I've got it enabled at the moment). My Documents is on the Samsung HDD though, as a lot of games create files in there (and the subfolder Saved Games) so it gets rather large and I also like to keep the data separate from the System drive as it makes it easier to do System Images and Data Backups separately.

Gosh you don't half waffle All I want to know is if the spikes are normal and if so, why I don't get them with the USB3 drive?

New WD 2TB, benchmark shows a lot of spikes rather than the smooth curve I was expecting Samsung 2TB looks quite similar I have a SSD now but before when Windows was on the Samsung, it was obvious that it was accessing the drive and affecting the benchmark My Samsung 500GB in a USB3 enclosure produces a fairly smooth curve So any ideas why the internal drives don't look like that? I also noticed that the WD has a much higher burst rate than the Samsung (303 vs 180 MB/s), although the other stats are pretty close. So would games and apps load faster from the WD or would the burst rate not effect that?

Or just use Standby like I do and it's even quicker It's just occassionally I do have to reboot and I wanted to make that as quick as possible and that 35s postboot seems rather long for a SSD but it's actually pretty usable before that I think, so whatever it's doing the fact that I'm booting from an SSD seems to mostly negate any effect. I'll have to try disabling the Avast tasks and see if they are causing the long postboot. I could understand My Documents being on the HDD causing some delay if all my programs were loading, as I'm sure some of them store their data in My Documents rather than Program Data but even then it shouldn't take much time to load a few 100KB config files. With startup programs disabled though, I can't think of anything that Windows would need to access from My Documents at boot. Maybe it has to touch it to populate the location internally but that shouldn't take long. I'll have to check my RAMDisk doesn't load during the selective startup too but I can't think that it would with everything disabled. I point my temp folders to that though, so I'm not sure where Windows would put them if it can't find the drive or if this could be causing a delay, so I'll have to test by pointing them to the SSD to make sure.

Before your post, I did another boot with the Afterburner task disabled and I also ran the Avast task manually in the hope this would prevent it needing to run again when booting. It didn't make any difference as far as I can see though. summary_boot (without Afterburner).xml: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESWXFGX3lZdjJORk0/edit?usp=sharing It may be that because I have My Documents on a separate drive (HDD not SSD) that this slows Windows down when doing the post boot, although I doubt the drive has had enough time to spindown between POST and post boot. I'm not sure why it would need to access My Documents during post boot but you never know with Windows!

OK but I'm fairly sure that Afterburner was the only thing I didn't stop loading (due to it loading via scheduled task, which msconfig doesn't handle) so does that account for all the delay?

OK, I've done a clean boot now, although MSI Afterburner still loaded for some reason but I doubt that added much to the time. bootDoneViaExplorer="15139" seems fine but bootDoneViaPostBoot="35839" seems a bit long clean_boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER+LATENCY+DISPATCHER_1.7z: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESRUpwMzRTZF9pODQ/edit?usp=sharing clean_boot_xbootmgr.log: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESanZObmNNNnhET1U/edit?usp=sharing

IE10 is locking up when opening some pages and then asks if I want to recover the page. If I leave it long enough, eventually the page becomes responsive. Any other tabs I have open at the time continue to work, it's just the MSFN one that freezes. This is the link I'm experiencing the problem with http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140247-trace-windows-7-bootshutdownhibernatestandbyresume-issues/?view=getnewpost I reported it here as I thought it might be something messed up about my IE install but it seems it's not just me: http://www.sevenforums.com/browsers-mail/313045-ie10-switching-between-tabs-not-working-when-fullscreen.html#post2611931

OK, that's good I guess (although makes me wonder why it was high before). Avast is Antivirus and Comodo is Firewall. I'll try booting without the other stuff though and see what it goes down to. I don't use hibernation at all but use standby most of the time.

OK, uploaded here: boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER+LATENCY+DISPATCHER_1.7z: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESMVpRclM4amMwajA/edit?usp=sharing summary_boot (CPU).xml: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESb1pwTmh6STJLS0k/edit?usp=sharing

OK, I finally got myself a SSD and would appreciate if you could take a look at the trace to compare and check it's eliminated the problems I had due to the drive being busy. The above files are still available if you need to check them to see the problems I had. From the summary, I see <timing bootDoneViaExplorer="14476" bootDoneViaPostBoot="53476" osLoaderDuration="641" which still seems a bit long for a SSD, so maybe you can advise me as to what is making it so? I don't know if it's normal but testing my SSD (Samsung 840 Evo 256GB) with Samsung Magician with RAPID enabled, it shows Read (up to 540): 537, Write (up to 520): 878 (that's due to RAPID, before I enabled it, it was around 502), Random Read (up to 97000): 66151, Random Write (up to 66000): 47698). So the Read and Write speeds seem OK but the IOPS seem rather low. boot_BASE+CSWITCH+POWER_1 (SSD).7z: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESUjBQcVFtczNIUFU/edit?usp=sharing summary_boot (SSD).xml: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89phEESdVJXaG1NY2xwSVU/edit?usp=sharing

OK, my brother's replaced the SATA cable to the optical drive now with a higher quality one I got him to buy. He tells me that the first DVD he burnt after that (not cheap discs, Verbatim) failed to verify and I still see errors in the log like An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation. although the errors after 28/11 refer to CdRom3 instead, so I presume it just changed the number when he replaced the lead for some reason. Any suggestions?

We've given up on Burnaware and Ashampoo as they both have stupid bugs that affect burning audio CDs. WMP seems to be quite capable for this task so that's what we're using for now, although I might install Nero as my brother's used to that. I noticed the following in the System log though The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR2 (and DR3) Googling this (and considering he only has two internal HDDs) it seems this must be his USB stick. Does the "controller error" refer to the USB controller on the motherboard or on the USB stick? If the latter, I guess his stick is just knackered and should be replaced but if the former, it's more concerning.

That tends to be an error (like electrical interference or bad/intermittent contact) in the actual cable/connector (SATA in this case). As an example, it was typical of ATA66+ IDE hard disk drives on 40 pin cable I would verify contacts/connector and try replacing the cable, before anything else. jaclaz OK, thanks. I did replace the cable once already (in fact all the SATA cables) as the previous one seemed to be problematic but I'm sure I checked the new one and it was OK. I'll get him to check it's connected securely anyway and buy him a new one if it still isn't working properly. Any ideas about why I can't kill the programs that are hanging though?

I've sent my brother his nice new PC and he's quite happy with it but he's having a lot of problems with programs that use the optical drive. I installed a variety of programs to cover the tasks he does, including BurnAware Free. I just observed over Teamviewer that this locks up and it was impossible to kill, either via the TaskManager, taskkill or Process Hacker. It had two programs running, AudioCD.exe and MP3Disc.exe, neither of which I could kill, even after he ejected the drive (I've found sometimes that programs get locked up whilst trying to access the disc, so removing it can sometimes unfreeze them). I then tried Ashampoo Burning Studio but that locked up and wouldn't let me kill it either. I can understand it might have been fighting for the drive with BurnAware but I still should have been able to kill them. He also ripped a DVD the other day and said it seemed to be slower than on his old Pentium 3 900Mhz PC with IDE optical drive and it also had an error in the rip which he had to correct with FixVTS which he didn't get on his old PC. Looking at the System Log, I see a lot of the following: An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation. and The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block. He has DVDFabPasskey installed, so I wonder if that needs to be shutdown before running these burning apps? He says the BurnAware Free also told him his disc was too big (i.e. over 80mins), despite the total time shown only being 79-something minutes and that either that program or Ashampoo said there was a problem verifying after the burn, although he was able to use another program to verify (I'm not sure what he used) and that worked fine. His main HDD is on the separate SATA3 inteface and he has an IDE HDD on that. The optical drive is currently the only device on the SATA2 ports, apart from the lead to the SATA port on the front panel (which doesn't have any devices connected to it).