Computer freezing

Hiya, I am having problems with my external harddrive and was wondering if anyone could narrow down a solution? I have a laptop and an external, which I keep all my photos and music on. Recently I was having trouble with the music, iTunes would just stop playing music and the HDD would 'disconnect' from the computer, with an error 'Delayed write failure' popping up from the Windows XP tray. It said it couldn't write to 'Z:\$mft' or 'Z:\BitMap' or 'Z:\music\artist' and that the data was lost; try saving to another location etc. I researched a bit and just did a dskchk and defragmented the HDD and it seems to be better now. HOWEVER, when I try to go into my photos folder, Windows seems to just freeze up… sometimes I can copy a photo to desktop but it says it'll take two minutes and never finishes copying, and there is no preview. In exploring the folder, I can see all the files there, but can't even access Properties without the window freezing. Any ideas? Even if I could get them off somehow, there are quiet a few photos (thousands) and they're very important and only copies, all ideas will be greatly appreciated! Thanks

OK, weirdly enough, I used my Hotmail account to upload a photo, send it to myself and downloaded the image, and viola, I can see the image, I also ran a quick AVG scan over the images and there was no result, I guess one way to solve it would be to upload all the images etc to the web and download them, as it seems to work and the files aren't corrupt. Although, it is very time consuming….anyone have any ideas?

This type issue is often caused by the write cache used for external/removable devices. To minimize cache related problems, under My Computer, right click on the Removable Disk, then select Properties > Hardware, then highlight the removable device and select Properties > Policies, then ensure the "Optimize for quick removal" radio button is ticked and then "Ok" your way back out. You still should wait a second or two to ensure the write is complete, but then you can just safely pull USB device out without going through the Safely Remove Hardware icon. If it does not seem to help, you can change that property setting back. I have never been fond of USB - it never has lived up to expectations. Let's hope 3rd time's a charm as USB3.0 should be finalized in the next few months with new USB3.0 products shortly behind. Hopefully then, finally, these USB disconnect problems will fade away.