I’m having the same problem as Andrew. I’m not really sure if this has got to do with a new audio equipment (some equalizer) I’ve got recently because I’ve just hooked it up to my computer just now and that’s when I’ve started getting these Delayed Write Failed errors. It may just be a coincidence, but whatever. I’ve got 3 internal drives - 2 of which have 250 GBs each for their capacities, and the other 500 GBs. I’m only having problems with the 500 GB drive (G:\) and I’ve looked all over Google trying to find a solution. I’ve yet to do an error-checking on it, but I’ll do so after rebooting my computer seen as the drive has completely disappeared off My Computer. Damn…I sure hope this would get sorted out - it’s all too sudden

What I have found to be the cause in commercially produced external drives is heat. Many of the drives today leave out a critical piece of hardware, a small case fan to move air through the system. I had an old external device that had two small fans and never had a problem with it until the internal fans went out. Then the problem began to occur during long file transfers. I replaced the fans and the problem went away.

I purchased a new external drive later no fans just a few poorly place vent holes and I had the problem with any transfer that lasted more than 5 to 10 minutes. I cut a hole in the side of the box and installed a 30mm fan. No more Delay read/write errors until the fan failed.

The bottom line look for a system with a fan or buy a box with a fan and add your own HD.

So since yesterday, I have been unable to open up my External Harddrive. Everytime I restart it, I have the autoplay come up and it appears under my computer, however, once it reaches the “My documents” part of my folder, it just continues search and search and search, and eventually, it disappears and the E:/ disappears from My Computer. So, I am unable to do a chkdisc. Occasionally, the Delayed WRite Failed message will come up with the $MFT message coming up on the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I tried to update the registry and fix the cacheset and still nothing.

Like I said, I’m not sure if I did these things right, but I’d like to get some help.

Just a quick note to anyone having this issue and still using USB 1.1 as I was.
Before messing around with the registery, try upgrading to USB 2.0. You can buy a PCI card with 4 USB 2 ports for around $20… All my problems went away, not to mention the much faster copy times.

Hope this helps

I did chkdsk.

solved the problem.