Switching external HDD between ESATA and USB3

MD-PA

Distinguished
Apr 28, 2012
17
0
18,510
I use two bare 3TB drives for backup and on/offline storage on an MSI X-power mobo, Win10. Normally I use them via E-SATA (AHCI on one of the mobo's Intel ports, not its Marvell or JMicron). Two questions:

1) When they are both in the Thermaltake BlacX Duet dock, only one is seen by the BIOS and by Windows. I'm sure that with previous HDDs and Win 7 I was seeing both, so the mobo port multiplier function is OK -- does something in the dock or BIOS have a problem with two HDDs that big on a single physical SATA port?

2) To work around that, I tried connecting one (previously initalized and used via ESATA) to a known good USB 3 port,via a Seagate GoFlex connector. It shows up in Drive Management as a "healthy GPT protected partition", but all disk and partiution actions are grayed out so I can't give it a drive letter. In Properties-> events I read

Device USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_Seagate&Prod___FA_GoFlex_Desk&Rev__D18\01234567&0 could not be migrated.

Last Device Instance Id: IDE

Any suggestions on either or both would be appreciated.

 

popatim

Titan
Moderator
1: Intel does not support port multiplication under windows. Amd and others do. use a different esata port if you can.
Plus early versions of the duet did not work with 3tb drives, you had to pre-format them down to 2tb, well 2.2tb technically.

2: sounds like a corruption issue. could be a sata bridge format issue or corruption cause by not ejecting the drive before removing it. If the duet can still read the drive then back it up immediately if the data is important.
 

MD-PA

Distinguished
Apr 28, 2012
17
0
18,510