Hi,
I have an external HDD 3T, which was not working anymore, and I found out, that the external chip was not working anymore. So I bought the plugable UASP1 with the hope to get it running again. At first it seemed to work, the HDD was spinning up again and everything sounded great, but the PC does not recognize the HDD. I did some research and found out, that this problem is quite common, if the HDD uses 4k instead of 512 encryption. Could this be the problem and if yes, what can I do?
Best Regards,
Matthias
Hi Matthias,
Thanks for contacting Plugable! Sorry to hear that your hard drive is not working as expected with our SATA dock.
All Plugable SATA docks support the standard 4K and 512e sector emulation types. However, some SATA hard drives and docks use proprietary non-standard sector emulation types which are usually only compatible with each other (eg WD with WD, Seagate with Seagate).
Unfortunately it sounds like your WD drive is formatted with WD’s proprietary sector emulation, which our SATA docks do not support by design, specifically to avoid the compatibility issues that you are experiencing!
For future reference, you can confirm this by formatting the drive as an internal SATA drive in any Windows computer, then moving it to the Plugable dock. It should work correctly from there. But if you take the WD drive as-is and place it in a Windows install with an internal SATA cable, it will not be recognized either. In other words, it has to sit in a WD dock or enclosure that supports WD’s proprietary flavor of sector emulation.
If you have important data on the WD drive, I would contact WD support and see what solution they can offer. They have helped other customers in the past in similar situations.
Feel free to email us at support@plugable.com with any questions!
Thank you,
Jordan
Plugable Technologies