kama connect 2 ide 3.5 problems

[Galnospoke]

Originally Posted by hiroshige

Does "stop working" mean, that the HDD is not starting or that the HDD is not recognised by your PC? If it is not recognised, then this is surely a driver-related problem.

Cheers,
Stefan - Scythe EU Hamburg

No spinup = power problem.

[Juen]

Same problem here, with IDE HDDS, the disks work slowly or even aren't recogniced, the problem dissapear when I connect a molex from the PC.

[bruenen]

Same problem here!!!

The 3.5" IDE HDD don't spinup, if they are driven by the KC2 power cable. While using an external power supply (moltex connector from second PC), the HDD spins up and everything works as expected. All tested 3.5" IDE HDDs don't even try to spin up (no noice from the motor). Only a very old HDD tries to spin up, but doesn't reach working level.
Even the SATA HDDs don't spin up. As the KC2 drives these devices, I'm not able to check, if an external power supply would do the job.

[hiroshige]

Hello guys,

actually there is only one way to test what's going wrong: Please send me your addresses by PM, I will send you the molex adaptor of the KC2 device. If this will solve your problems, great. If not, you have to send back the device for RMA.

Cheers,
Stefan - Scythe EU Hamburg

[bruenen]

Hello hiroshige,

Thanks for the quick answer.

I send my address info to you. You should have already got it as a PM.


I'm not sure, that the new molex cable will solve the problem.
As I already mentioned, the SATA HDDs doesn't spin up.

Probably, I will find time in the near future to check all possible constellations of HDDs (PATA 2.5/3.5 und SATA). If I get new information on this topic, I will inform you.

As soon as I get the new cable, I'm will test it and inform you about the results.

Regards
Karl-Heinz

[bmd]

Hi!

About a year I ago I bought a no-name Chinese IDE/SATA to USB adapter, powered by a JMicron chip. All was working fine and I was using the device for backups, testing Linux distributions etc. A few months ago while migrating data from an old IDE drive to a new SATA one, i have found out that the files are randomly corrupted on read. Fortunately I noticed this on time and I could recover the files by plugging the drive directly to the board.

Fast forward to yesterday. Tired of connecting IDE drives to the only IDE connector on the mainboard, I have decided to buy a Scythe Kama Connect 2. Out of pure curiosity I started comparing backup data from an IDE drive to the files on one of the internal SATA drives. Now you can imagine the horror when I have discovered that the brand new Scythe Kama Connect 2 (serial number 200811010744) had EXACTLLY the same problem.

How I tested: I used "Synchronize Dirs" in Total Commander, with "ignore date" and "by content" checked on 5-10 GB of files.

Things I have tried:
- ran memtest+ for 45 minutes, no errors;
- changed various BIOS options;
- used 2 other USB cables;
- used both front pannel USB connectors, and rear mainboard USB connectors;
- used a power connector from the computer's power source;
- used the power brick from the old IDE/SATA-USB adapter;
- tried 2 other BIOS versions;

Every time, the same problem came up: various, different, files were corrupted on read. After a few hours, I gave up.

Thinking that the Intel P35 mainboard could be the problem, I took the Scythe Kama Connect 2 at work today. I have repeated the tests on two work computers, one with nVidia nForce 4 chipset and one with Intel 945 chipset, same story.

Since there are other posts of this kind in the Scythe forum and since I have the same problem with the no-name adapter (also JMicron powered) I must ask, before taking the product back to the seller: is this a JMicron related problem? Is there a solution to this problem?

[hiroshige]

Hello bmd,

thanks a lot for your detailed error description. Actually I'm really sure that this is not an issue only of Jmicron but of the complete device. For me it sounds as if you have the CRC errors we observed for a small number of KC2 devices.

Could you please arrange replacement by your seller and give me a not if the new device works as it should?

Kind regards,
Stefan - Scythe EU Hamburg

[bmd]

Yes, I'll do that in a few days. There's another thing I forgot to mention: each time a CRC error occurs, the HDD produces a sound as if the head moves in a different way than it does during normal read.