Monday 2 April 2012

Hitachi Touro Desk 3.0

Capacity: 2GB
Cost: £85 from ebuyer.com
Interface: USB 3.0/2.0
Included: External Drive, PSU, USB 3.0 Cable.
Format: NTFS

Here is the performance from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1:



This is faster than my WD caviar black 750 GB 7200rpm internal SATAII drive.

I bought this drive for the purpose of doing Windows System Images as a weekly backup strategy.
However, when you try, you get the error:

   The backup failed.
   The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. (0x8007045D).





I can do a system backup no problem with a Verbatim 2GB USB 2.0 drive, and also with a WD 1GB usb 3.0 HD, so the problem is not with the PC or OS (Windows 7 Pro 64 bit).

Looking at the Drives  Properties->Security tab, I noticed that the device owner was  long number, and my user had no write permission.  Interestngly, I could create directories on the drive, but I could not copy any files to the root of the drive.

The first thing I tried was to take ownership of the drive.  This failed with an error saying that the permissions would be left in an inconsisten state.  So I ran this:

  chkdsk /R D:

This takes many hours, and results in the following:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>chkdsk /R d:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Hitachi.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
  256 file records processed.
File verification completed.
  0 large file records processed.
  0 bad file records processed.
  0 EA records processed.
  0 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
  290 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
  0 unindexed files scanned.
  0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
  256 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
  17 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
  240 files processed.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
  488250271 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
Insufficient disk space to fix the attribute definition table.
CHKDSK aborted.



The drive is empty with 2GB free, so its not clear what could be done about this.

However, now the drive at least shows me as the owner.  I edited the security permissions, and gave everyone full control:

  

However, I still get the same error when trying to do a backup.

Next step is to reformat, using the default block size of 4k.  After this, the permissions are fixed, and the properties reveals that "SYSTEM" is the owner.

 However, same error when doing backup.

The response from Hitachi was that the drive (and most other large drives) use 512E (i.e. 4k physical blocksize and 512 logical block size), and that MS dont support this for windows backup tools.  They point to this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2510009

Reading this clause:

If you are using a logical sector drive of a size other than 512 bytes, Windows system image backup and restore operations may fail, and you receive the following error message

One of the backup files could not be created.
Details: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.
Error code: 0x8078002A


The key here is that the drive IS using 512 logical block size (i.e. sectors), so the statement that MS backup doesnt support 512E is false.

RMA.