Weird hard drive behaviour via USB

[Awen]

I have an issue with a couple of external hard drives - and I'm hoping someone has more insight than I do!

I have an external USB 3.0 4x bay enclosure from Hotway.
The enclosure itself was working fine with a previous build - but only worked fine on a specific USB port (the one USB 3.2 port I had on that motherboard).

I then made a whole new PC and connected the enclosure back up. 
Now, any time I transfer significant numbers of files, or one large file, the drive will freeze.  It looks like it's constantly seeking, the LEDs on the enclosure flicker rapidly as if the drive is accessing, but the drive is otherwise completely unresponsive.

I have:

• disabled legacy USB in the BIOS
• tried multiple different USB ports, including a 2.0 port (which works BETTER, but can still have this issue)
• disabled Remote Differential Compression (no change)
• enabled performance mode on the drives in Device Manager

 

So...  looking at all of this objectively, you'd think the drives were faulty - right?
But they're not.  If I connect them via SATA, they work PERFECTLY.  I've run SMART tools on them and they look perfect and are in good health.  I've run disk checks on them using Chkdsk - absolutely fine.  I ran a full sector-by-sector scan using HDDScan.  No bad sectors/blocks.

...and yet, for the life of me, I cannot get the enclosure to work properly.

The ONLY thing I can think of now is that perhaps the USB controller just doesn't like this enclosure.  But I've tried connecting to the controller via the CPU (7800X3D) and via the motherboard (Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite) and get the same result.

I'm at a total loss.

Thoughts?

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, Awen said:

So...  looking at all of this objectively, you'd think the drives were faulty - right?

Nope, my first thought would be a flaky usb - sata chip. They are notoriously unreliable, harddrives on the other hand...

[Applefreak]

3 hours ago, Awen said:

I have an issue with a couple of external hard drives - and I'm hoping someone has more insight than I do!

I have an external USB 3.0 4x bay enclosure from Hotway.
The enclosure itself was working fine with a previous build - but only worked fine on a specific USB port (the one USB 3.2 port I had on that motherboard).

I then made a whole new PC and connected the enclosure back up. 
Now, any time I transfer significant numbers of files, or one large file, the drive will freeze.  It looks like it's constantly seeking, the LEDs on the enclosure flicker rapidly as if the drive is accessing, but the drive is otherwise completely unresponsive.

I have:

• disabled legacy USB in the BIOS
• tried multiple different USB ports, including a 2.0 port (which works BETTER, but can still have this issue)
• disabled Remote Differential Compression (no change)
• enabled performance mode on the drives in Device Manager

 

So...  looking at all of this objectively, you'd think the drives were faulty - right?
But they're not.  If I connect them via SATA, they work PERFECTLY.  I've run SMART tools on them and they look perfect and are in good health.  I've run disk checks on them using Chkdsk - absolutely fine.  I ran a full sector-by-sector scan using HDDScan.  No bad sectors/blocks.

...and yet, for the life of me, I cannot get the enclosure to work properly.

The ONLY thing I can think of now is that perhaps the USB controller just doesn't like this enclosure.  But I've tried connecting to the controller via the CPU (7800X3D) and via the motherboard (Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite) and get the same result.

I'm at a total loss.

Thoughts?

Did you check if the case supports the total capacity of HDDs in it? Might overload the controller. Not all of them are equal here, might explain why the case doesn't play nice with your onboard USB controller. What happens when you reduce the number of HDDs in it?

[Awen]

On 8/24/2023 at 4:38 PM, Applefreak said:

Did you check if the case supports the total capacity of HDDs in it? Might overload the controller. Not all of them are equal here, might explain why the case doesn't play nice with your onboard USB controller. What happens when you reduce the number of HDDs in it?

Yeah, I thought about that too.  I do think it's a degree of controller overload - but it's a 4-bay device and I currently have only two drives plugged into it.  One of those drives is an SSHD, which might possibly make a difference (perhaps the NAND cache is too fast for the controller?), but the issue exists when I'm not writing to that drive, so it's still a bit up in the air.

It does seem like this isn't an uncommon problem, looking around online, but people seem to have found solutions to it by using different USB ports or controllers...  so perhaps it's just that none of mine are up to the task.

I thought about buying a separate USB PCIe controller card, but that seems like a stupid expense for something that should just work 'out of the box'.