We have a local Office computer running Windows XP pro 32bit that we use as a file server as well as backup server. On top of the 1TB internal storage we have 2- 500GB removable drives that we swap out daily for off-site storage. Problem: We started getting these delayed write fail errors about 2 weeks ago specifically pertaining to the removable drives. We took each drive did a complete format and tested them for file transfer, everything seemed good. I don't think they made it 2 days before each started showing the same errors. We have had these drives for 3 years so we decided it would be time to replace them. We replaced them with new removable drives and we still get the same error. So now that we have ruled out hardware we are looking into the software. We did some research online and found that it might be linked to the size of the transfer file, which all in all are around 16GB total. We read that disabling DMA would remedy the problem but slow down your computer significantly. We tried it just to see if it worked, but it still did not correct the problem. Any ideas on what we could do next? Thanks in advanced.

Probably not any help but I have Seagate external drives which would give me these errors every few hours or so. I went to the Seagate forums with two fixes that claimed would work but neither did even though everyone praised original poster for the fix. I tried everything I knew with no joy. For whatever reason, I was convinced that it was something to do with power management. I set the turn off hard disks to never which seem to work but didn't. I then got the notion to download Seagate Manager, installed and it had an option for never power down which I selected and it fixed it. My thoughts were, that's fairly lame having to download an 80 mb install and install it just to get the errors to go away. I then went back to OS power options dialog and noticed even though the Turn off Hardisks was set to never, I still had a Power Scheme option selected which was overiding the individual setting. Then decided to rollback to a snapshot prior to installing Seagate Manager, set Power Scheme option to always on plus turn off hard disks to never and problem was solved. Since then, the only delayed write error I get is when the power goes off.

Ok, I did see that the power management was to blame even on the MS site. I had never hibernate selected and hard drives off never. To be explicit so i can ensure that i am not misunderstanding what you told me, where are these "main power scheme settings" that over ride the system settings? Or were you refering to the Seagate manager settings being over ridden by the Windows power settings? Thanks for your help!

I'm referring to control panel > power options. For me when the power options dialog is open, at the top there's a menulist for different power schemes. I selected "Always On". Down below the power schemes menulist is Turn off hard disks: menulist and I selected "Never". I was not referring to Seagate manager. I totally removed it by rolling back a snapshot taken with Eaz-Fix prior to installing SG manager. Curious to know if it works for you as well. Just to let you know, when I was getting these errors, I checked the drives frequently with different tools but they always checked healthy.