2TB drives are very flaky

1

2TB drives come and go randomly, cannot actually get anything copied off onto them.
New plugable SATA drive dock, USB 3.0. Power light is on. A couple of different WD 2TB drives (which to be fair aren’t super reliable to begin with) won’t work.
Drive will be seen, show up long enough to partition and format. Then switch to drive and create a directory. A few seconds later, it disappears. (The whole device seems to disappear.)
Is there a list of drives known to work? Do I have a bad plugable unit?

2

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for posting! For USB 3.0 issues, we’d recommend upgrading to the latest firmware for the SATA dock … it increases error tolerance, which can be a help.

http://plugable.com/2011/02/08/firmwa…

If you can, let us know here if this resolves the issues you’re seeing on the WD 2TB drives. If not, we’ll figure out what’s going wrong.

Thank you!
Bernie

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Firmware update would not make USB 3.0 work - same problem.
USB 2.0 seems to be better so far.

Do you have a list of drives you are sure work? (Lots of 2TB drives are just plain flaky regardless of how they are connected, that’s why I have boxes of them lying around.)

The behavoir is the same - the drive might or might not appear at a PNP event, and then would be gone either very early in a copy, or before a copy could be started.

By the way - the plug would then turn off its power light, is that expected?

4

Hi Bryan - we would expect all SATA drives (that work via other connections) to work also with the SATA dock. Put another way - there shouldn’t be special compatibility issues on the SATA side; the connection difficulties are usually on the USB 3.0 side because of host controller, cabling, or dock issues.

Because of this, we don’t have any SATA drive reliability lists in abstract - we’d have to point at reviews and review sites are the best source purely on the “which SATA drive to buy” question.

Back to our dock, it does sound like the dock is getting dropped off the USB 3.0 bus when those errors happen. USB 3.0 is still maturing, so there can be many causes. With the firmware upgrade (to increase tolerance), there’s nothing more that can be done from a software point of view. To rule in/out our hardware, we’d like to get you a pre-tested unit to compare against.

If that sounds like it might help, please just email your Amazon order # to support@plugable.com and we’ll get that going.

Thanks for your patience!
Bernie