Re: External hard drive paging operation error

I found this information from the Seagate knowledge base
(http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/knowledge_base/):

A paging operation is defined as anytime the operating system writes or
reads data from memory to drive, or reads from the hard drive and writes to
memory. These errors are not caused by the external storage device. The
error may be related to problems in either the USB / ATA / SCSI / 1394
controller sub system or another storage device.

Seagate seems to acknowledge the issue but I don't get those errors from my
Western Digital or Iomega drives. Maybe it is a Seagate thing. Next time I
see a similar sale for a different brand external HDD, I will buy and try it
and post back the results.



"Shawn E. Hale" <SEHaleNOSPAM1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ez27P3YiHHA.1456@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I recently purchased a Seagate FreeAgent 320GB USB external drive and
plugged it into my desktop computer (Gateway running XP Pro). The drive
was recognized immediately and I copied files to it with no problems.
While reviewing my Event Viewer, I found the following (truncated) entry -
which was repeated about on an hourly basis when the computer was idle:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 51
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\D during a paging
operation.

I tried plugging it into different USB ports, running chkdsk /r and /f,
Seagate utilities, reformatting it, etc. and the same error occurred. No
errors were detected in the tests and I would not have known about the
error message if I didn't happen to see it in the Event Viewer. I got the
same message when the Seagate was plugged into another laptop and my work
laptop. Google results and MS Knowledge Base indicate that this error can
be ignored and "no user action is required" if this error occurs on
non-primary drives. I brought that drive back and exchanged it for another
one with the same errors. I have other, older external USB drives that I
use (Iomega 80 GB and Western Digital 250 GB) but these drives do not
generate the paging errors when hooked to my desktop or laptop computers.
Despite the directions to ignore the error message, I don't feel
comfortable with an Event Viewer log full of disk error messages. Am I
over-reacting? Am I wasting my time looking for another external hard
drive or do all newer external drives generate that error? Thanks for any
advice.






.

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