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Does ImDisk support drives on External Drive?

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#1 NobodyWithNoName

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Posted 04 November 2022 - 05:36 AM

Hi, I'm facing a very weird issue. I will appreciate it if you try and let me know.

I have a virtual machine on a external HDD made by VMWare Workstation with 200GB space.

 

When i mount the disk using ImDisk and try to copy a game into it which has 40GB of size, in middle of copying speed drops to 0 and entire PC freeze and become functional. The only way to fix it is to emergency remove mounted image, Unplug External HDD from computer, Restart PC. if I don't do that it freeze forever.

 

I move the virtual machine to my internal HDD and tried the same thing and it copied data with no problem.

Is there any known issues with External HDDs or my drive is dying?

 

I use the drive daily I feel it became slower but it doesn't hang or freeze pc.

 



#2 Wonko the Sane

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Posted 04 November 2022 - 09:17 AM

Sorry to give you bad news, but it is more likely that there is a hardware problem, not necessarily the external hard disk in itself, it could well be the (USB) bridge inside the external case (it could "choke" on large data transfers) or also (but is much less likely) a component in your motherboard USB bus or a "flaky" cable/connection.

 

How big is the disk/how much free space in it do you have?

 

I mean have you tested copying a 40-50 GB file to the disk/filesystem without mounting the virtual disk (via Imdisk or other driver)?

 

There is no reason - in theory - why Imdisk should cause such an issue (and the counter-test you did on internal disk should mean that imdisk runs fine).

 

Personally I would make a dd-like image of the external disk (better be safe than sorry) and then check it, possibly with the manufacturer's own test suite or with Victoria or other similar disk tool (depending on the specific model you might be able to extract it from the external case and connect it directly to a Sata port, that usually allows better access to the disk).

 

Still depending on the model of the disk and bridge you might be able to check the SMART (what I call DUMB) data, those are not a good indicator of a "next" failure, i.e. a disk with perfect SMART data may as well fail in thee next ten minutes, but if the stats are bad often it means that there are issues, try using Smartmontools or this thingy here:

http://reboot.pro/in...showtopic=21659

 

:duff:

Wonko


  • Olof Lagerkvist and NobodyWithNoName like this

#3 NobodyWithNoName

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Posted 04 November 2022 - 12:21 PM

Sorry to give you bad news, but it is more likely that there is a hardware problem, not necessarily the external hard disk in itself, it could well be the (USB) bridge inside the external case (it could "choke" on large data transfers) or also (but is much less likely) a component in your motherboard USB bus or a "flaky" cable/connection.

 

How big is the disk/how much free space in it do you have?

 

I mean have you tested copying a 40-50 GB file to the disk/filesystem without mounting the virtual disk (via Imdisk or other driver)?

 

There is no reason - in theory - why Imdisk should cause such an issue (and the counter-test you did on internal disk should mean that imdisk runs fine).

 

Personally I would make a dd-like image of the external disk (better be safe than sorry) and then check it, possibly with the manufacturer's own test suite or with Victoria or other similar disk tool (depending on the specific model you might be able to extract it from the external case and connect it directly to a Sata port, that usually allows better access to the disk).

 

Still depending on the model of the disk and bridge you might be able to check the SMART (what I call DUMB) data, those are not a good indicator of a "next" failure, i.e. a disk with perfect SMART data may as well fail in thee next ten minutes, but if the stats are bad often it means that there are issues, try using Smartmontools or this thingy here:

http://reboot.pro/in...showtopic=21659

 

:duff:

Wonko

Thank you Wonko for the reply,

Yes I tried copying same data directly to external hard drive and it did copy without any problem, Also I used virtual machine for some hours and it was ok.

 

I agree with D.U.M.B since i lost a hard before with perfect surface test and SMART, I'm still in grief of my data.

 

So if regular copy works fine can it be a driver conflict or something because it chocks randomly sometimes aftert copying 4GB and sometimes 12GB... Copy process starts at 60MB speed and drops to 20MB over time and suddenly drops to 10 or 0 and stuck.

 

Also i tried to map the vmdk using VMWare Workstation Mapper and I copied same data, Copying process started at 70MB/s and dropped to ~1.5/2MB/s but it finished with no crash just so slow.


Edited by NobodyWithNoName, 04 November 2022 - 01:03 PM.


#4 Wonko the Sane

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Posted 04 November 2022 - 05:35 PM

The "starting fast and then slow down" could well be a sort of "funnel effect" due to some cache (either in software or in the hard disk hardware) but what you report sounds a bit too much. :unsure:

 

I never happened personally to see a similar case (same hardware, same OS, same everything) behaving so differently when Imdisk (or the VMware tool) is involved, the fact that this latter shows the same slowdown (but not a crash) could be only that for some reasons imdisk crashes when it slow downs too much (or if you prefer that the VMware tool has better error control).

 

But I cannot imagine a reason why you have this behaviour, could it be *something else* in your OS that *somehow* hooks on the data transfer (like an antivirus or similar)?

 

Which OS is that?

 

You could try doing the same when booted from a PE (this would exclude the OS and other programs) but it would probably be a lot of work to prepare a PE if you don't have one already made (and with imdisk) handy.

 

Could you try a different virtual disk driver?

 

You could try OFSmount:

https://www.osforens...isk-images.html

 

which originally came as a derivative of Imdisk, but that later was AFAIK developed independently or "jump" to Arsenal Mounter (also by Olof) that has a different (lower level) integration with Windows:

 

http://reboot.pro/to...miniport-driver

 

http://reboot.pro/in...showtopic=22068

 

and see if the behaviour remains the same.

 

:duff:

Wonko

 

 







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