explorer.exe crash when searching hard drive, possible windows cant keep up? help

[Visable-assassin]

Hey guys my main storage drive (160gb seagate ATA100) drive is giving me shit.
Ive damn near filled it (4gb free) and when I am searching through it its kind of sluggish trying to load all the jpg thumbnails or what not...and then out of the blue epxlorer.exe will just crash. now the my rig runs just fine, and as long as Im not doing any heavy file searching I have not one problem! I use this drive for my MP3's and videos (Macgyver, and my DVD rips) and all of that runs just fine. Is it possible that windows just cant keep up with trying to display all the thumbnails and fucks up? is there something I could try to stop this? my old 80gb SATA drive would do the same shit. its now formatted and running as my windows swap file and the contents were moved to a 250gb 16mb SATA (in 3gb/s mode) drive...and the issue doesnt exist. now should I swap this drive out for another SATA drive and call it a day or would a newer 320gb 16mb ATA100 drive suit me better? or should I go with a larger 3gb/s SATA drive with native command queing? I dont trust SATA all that well since Ive lost 2 drives from different makers...both with important shit on them. But is SATA as reliable as PATA or no? Im just scared to switch and lose everything.
Help me out please.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Buy a backup device if you're worried about losing data, it's a hundred bucks well spent. Sata drives are every bit as reliable as pata; they use the same internals for the most part.

Explorer generally crashes for me when trying to generate thumbnails for very large or very broken images, and sometimes video clips with poorly programmed decompressors. Anything corrupt in that folder? Does it seem to die at one particular file?

 

[Visable-assassin]

Buy a backup device if you're worried about losing data, it's a hundred bucks well spent. Sata drives are every bit as reliable as pata; they use the same internals for the most part.

Explorer generally crashes for me when trying to generate thumbnails for very large or very broken images, and sometimes video clips with poorly programmed decompressors. Anything corrupt in that folder? Does it seem to die at one particular file?

Nothing on that drive has gone bad. itll die and random areas not in the same spot, it oculd be a 1/4 of the way down or near the end and itll just give up.

 

[oplin]

Double check that there isn't a bad picture or movie in the directory, i've had many times where there was a bad movie and windows tried to make a preview of it and crashed explorer, you can disable it from previewing files just google around a bit for it. I'm guessing that will fix your problem.