250GB Samsung SSD in DockingStation (Plugable) Not showing up.

Discontinued Products USB3-SATA-U3
1

Plugged in a 250gb Samsung SSD into plugable docking station however drive doesn’t show up. Drive has already been formatted, and trying to clone drive. Using Mac OS 10.10.5. Nothing shows up in Disk Utilities either. What might I be missing? I swapped out with a regular HDD and it shows up fine.

2

Hi James,

Thanks for contacting Plugable! Sorry to hear that one of your drives is not yet detected in our hard drive dock.

If the hard drive was previously formatted in a certain operating system, it may not be recognizable in another operating system.

The best solution would be the following:

  1. Return problematic drive to last known working location / computer
  2. Back up all data
  3. Move drive to new computer and reformat (this will ERASE all data on the drive)
  4. Migrate data from backup location to new computer

If you have any other questions, please email support@plugable.com and we can assist further.

Thank you,
Jordan
Plugable Technologies

3

We purchased another docking station. Seems that the SSD was not compatible with your station. We just obtained a new station and the SSD appeared instantly.

So I can confirm the drive was not the issue, but a compatibility issue with the docking station.

Thank you,
James

4

Hi James,

Thanks for the update.

Our dock is compatible with all SATA drives that use universal formatted file systems. However, some drive manufacturers offer special firmware-side formatting options like sector emulation that we chose not to support because of the compatibility issues it can cause.

If you can provide the exact make and model of your hard drive, and what Plugable dock model you are using, I can check to confirm if there is any incompatibility.

Or, once you backup the data with the new dock, you can simply reformat the drive with standard formatting and our dock should detect it.

Thank you,
Jordan
Plugable Technologies

5

What format should the drive be in?

Currently it is formatted NTFS.

Model- MZ-750250 Samsung

6

Hi James,

Mac OSX does not fully support NTFS formatted drives. Some versions of OSX can read but not write, while most cannot read or write at all.

Please email support@plugable.com and we can personally assist with options.

Thank you,
Jordan
Plugable Technologies