The drive's name of Seagate Replica was established when it was formatted at the factory. I could have re-named it but didn't feel the need.
Update.
Last night's backup of D drive took over 4 hours with small 9100 kbyte files totalling 18 files with standard compression.
I contacted Seagate Tech support this morning and they told me that their drives can handle file sizes up to 16.5 TB. Since my two drives are 1.5 and 2.0 TB each, that didn't seem to be the problem. He suggested that I reformat the older drive (which was NTFS with an allocation unit size was 4096 bytes.) I changed the allocation unit size to 16 kilobytes and then did a quick format.
After the format, I attempted to backup my D drive. The backup took just under two hours and completed without any failure. To verify it, I clicked on the file and opened it with the backup browser. The files were readable. Total file size.... 101,305,715 KB
It appears that the problem could have been anything since the brand new drive also problemed out during the first backup. Maybe the allocation unit size was the cause over 95,000,000 KB's.... I don't know!
I will continue using the older drive for backing up for the rest of this week so that I have everything that I need. On Monday, next week, if everything functions properly, I'll reformat the new drive to 16 KB allocation units and we'll see what happens.
A 4KB NTFS cluster size will support a drive or file up to 16TB and thats way past the limit any MBR partition can handle.
Using a larger cluster size can be very wastefull if the drive is holding small files or a lot of files.
If that works for you, thats fine, but you should not need a cluster that big until you get to 32-64TB.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365
Dave
Dave,
Thanks for the reply. Since the two Seagate drives are being used for the sole purpose of backing up my computer, the only small files are the three "Symantec Recovery Environment files" and the one "VProRecoveryStorage.ini" file. The other files will be humungus.... well over the 100,000,000 KB mark.
My plan.... Use the 1.5 TB drive for a full week... Reformat the 2.0 TB and use it for a week. Then alternate between the two drives and reformat each before use as it appears that the fragmentation on the 1.5 may have caused the original problem. Why the brand new drive was problematic from the get-go is still a mystery.
Either way, I'm glad you figured it out. All the symptoms were pointing at the external drive being the problem.
Personally, I am a firm believer in doing a full format on any new drive for my own system rather than a quick format.
I have had a few strange things happen that went away after a full format, so I always stick with a full format when I'm setting up one of my own personal drives.
Maybe converting the sector size forced a full format and writing to every sector fixed whatever was going wrong.
Dave