eSata+USB2 enclosure and compatibility/weirdness?

[ohaya]

Hi,

I have a number of 2.5" enclosures from different manufacturers and I just noticed something that surprised me.

What I found is that if I format the drive in the enclosure (NTFS) when connected via USB2, then try to use the drive when it's connected via eSATA, Windows 7 says that I have to format the drive. Same thing happens vice-versa, i.e., if I format the drive when connected using eSATA and the try using it connected via USB2.

And yes, when I switch connections, I remove the "other" cable, and I've tried it with several different computers that have both eSATA and USB2 connectors.

Is this normal? I thought that I should be able to use either connection type interchangeably?

The one thing is that the drive I am using is one of the Momentus Hybrid drives, and I'm wondering if this is some kind of quirk with the hybrid type drives?

Unfortunately, I don't have another 2.5" SATA drive that I can try in these enclosures at the moment.

Has anyone ran into this before?

Thanks,
Jim

[TeraByte Support]

I never had a problem switching between 1394 and USB .. I would expect the
same with USB and eSATA. what is the difference you see in properties of
the drive/partition between the two?

"ohaya" wrote in message news:8963@public.tech.misc...

Hi,

I have a number of 2.5" enclosures from different manufacturers and I just
noticed something that surprised me.

What I found is that if I format the drive in the enclosure (NTFS) when
connected via USB2, then try to use the drive when it's connected via eSATA,
Windows 7 says that I have to format the drive. Same thing happens
vice-versa, i.e., if I format the drive when connected using eSATA and the
try using it connected via USB2.

And yes, when I switch connections, I remove the "other" cable, and I've
tried it with several different computers that have both eSATA and USB2
connectors.

Is this normal? I thought that I should be able to use either connection
type interchangeably?

The one thing is that the drive I am using is one of the Momentus Hybrid
drives, and I'm wondering if this is some kind of quirk with the hybrid type
drives?

Unfortunately, I don't have another 2.5" SATA drive that I can try in these
enclosures at the moment.

Has anyone ran into this before?

Thanks,
Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

I thought that I had narrowed this problem down to the drive being a hybrid drive, but now I think that it's the same problem even with normal/non-hybrid drives, and I've tried this now with 3 different enclosures including a new USB3.0/eSATA (Anker) enclosure, and see the same problem.

I have one drive that is a non-hybrid Seagate 750GB, and if I use the eSATA, BING sees it without the "USB 2.0 support" being checked, and I can use Fill in the boot menu editor, but if I switch to USB 3.0, BING does not see the drive at all, UNLESS I check the "USB 2.0 support" checkbox, HOWEVER even then, BING won't let me use Fill in the boot menu editor (the drive appears empty in the boot menu editor).

So now, I'm kind of stuck, as I can only use the drive on computers that have eSATA ...

BTW, during the boot, from the boot messages from the BIOS, the BIOS seems to ALWAYS see the drive, regardless of if I use USB or eSATA. It's just BING that doesn't see it (sometimes), and, because BING won't let me do Fill, I cannot see the drive in Windows.

Jim

[TeraByte Support]

"boot edit" only shows drives that are in the BIOS. Also, you should
upgrade to use BIBM.

"ohaya" wrote in message news:9013@public.tech.misc...

Hi,

I thought that I had narrowed this problem down to the drive being a hybrid
drive, but now I think that it's the same problem even with
normal/non-hybrid drives, and I've tried this now with 3 different
enclosures including a new USB3.0/eSATA (Anker) enclosure, and see the same
problem.

I have one drive that is a non-hybrid Seagate 750GB, and if I use the eSATA,
BING sees it without the "USB 2.0 support" being checked, and I can use Fill
in the boot menu editor, but if I switch to USB 3.0, BING does not see the
drive at all, UNLESS I check the "USB 2.0 support" checkbox, HOWEVER even
then, BING won't let me use Fill in the boot menu editor (the drive appears
empty in the boot menu editor).

So now, I'm kind of stuck, as I can only use the drive on computers that
have eSATA


....

BTW, during the boot, from the boot messages from the BIOS, the BIOS seems
to ALWAYS see the drive, regardless of if I use USB or eSATA. It's just
BING that doesn't see it (sometimes), and, because BING won't let me do
Fill, I cannot see the drive in Windows.

Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

Thanks.

As I mentioned:

"BTW, during the boot, from the boot messages from the BIOS, the BIOS seems
to ALWAYS see the drive, regardless of if I use USB or eSATA. "

So, since as you said, BING shows drives it sees in the BIOS in the Boot Edit, shouldn't it always show the drive, regardless of if I used USB or eSATA?

Also, if I did upgrade to BIBM, would these problems be resolved?

EDIT: I guess that I still don't understand why the same drive would appear as unformatted when connected via USB vs. eSATA (or vice-versa)? Is there something about the interfaces that would make Windows think the drive was unformatted? I am wondering if this is some kind of faulty implementation of the drive, but I keep trying different drives (from different manufacturers) and keep running into the same problem.

[Brian K]

ohaya wrote:

> Also, if I did upgrade to BIBM, would these problems be resolved?
>

Jim,

You could use the trial BIBM CD to see if it helps.

I have a 2 TB USB HD. BIBM doesn't see the partition on this HD in my 8 year old test computer but BIBM in my other computers sees the partition. Work with Partitions in IFL sees the partition on this HD which suggests it is a BIOS issue.

[TeraByte Support]

Hello,

Your BIOS isn't always including or counting the drive so sometimes you see
it and sometimes you don't. You can tell by going to partition work while
BIOS is selected and seeing the number of drives the BIOS reported and
respond to query.


"ohaya" wrote in message news:9017@public.tech.misc...

Hi,

Thanks.

As I mentioned:

"BTW, during the boot, from the boot messages from the BIOS, the BIOS seems
to ALWAYS see the drive, regardless of if I use USB or eSATA. "

So, since as you said, BING shows drives it sees in the BIOS in the Boot
Edit, shouldn't it always show the drive, regardless of if I used USB or
eSATA?

Also, if I did upgrade to BIBM, would these problems be resolved?

EDIT: I guess that I still don't understand why the same drive would appear
as unformatted when connected via USB vs. eSATA (or vice-versa)? Is there
something about the interfaces that would make Windows think the drive was
unformatted? I am wondering if this is some kind of faulty implementation
of the drive, but I keep trying different drives (from different
manufacturers) and keep running into the same problem.

[ohaya]

Hi,

Doing more testing this weekend, I am kind of starting to think that the problem I'm seeing may have something to do with the size of the drive.

With the two different 750GB drives (a Seagate Momentus and a Momentus XT (hybrid)) that I started testing with, I see the weird behavior where if I format while using USB, I can't see the drive when using eSATA.

With several smaller/older drives (one 250GB one and several 320GB drives, different mfrs), it works fine using either USB or eSATA.

I've tried this in at least 3 different types (mfr) of enclosures, and all say they can work with 1GB drives (i.e., so the 750GB drives are not too large for the enclosures).

All drives/partitions were formatted NTFS. Is there something about NTFS where, beyond a certain size, there might be different behavior like this?

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

It might be caused by the logical sector size being seen as 4096 bytes (4k) when connected via USB and 512 bytes when connected via SATA/eSATA.

You could run "fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x:" (where x: is the drive to check) to see what Windows sees in each case. The sizes are listed as "Bytes Per sector" (logical) and "Bytes Per Physical Sector" (physical).

[ohaya]

Paul,

A couple of questions:

1) If what you're theorizing is what is happening, would that cause Windows to think the drive was unformatted?

2) Also, if that's what is happening, what size of drive would be the "threshhold" size, i.e., what size drive would cause the problem?

3) Would that command work even in the case where Windows thought the drive was unformatted?

Thanks,
Jim