[SOLVED] Backup drive problems with USB 3.0

I've been trying for a week to get the backup drive that I assembled to work on my USB 3.0 ports, but still am having troubles. It's not the ports, other accessories operates perfectly fine on them (external cooler, USB flash drives, my other backup drive connected with a BYTECC USB 3.0 to eSATA adapter).

This assembled drive consists of a WD Caviar Blue 320GB, 7200 rpm, HDD (the stock HDD that came with my desktop) installed within a Vantec NexStar CX SuperSpeed enclosure. The thing is, it's recognized when plugged into the USB 2.0 port on the notebook, and works perfectly fine.

But when I plug it into the USB 3.0 port, there's a constant sound of trying to connect/install, and in the Device Manager, it constantly shows & disappears during this time.

I've used Bing & Google in search of answers for the issue, and it appears that plenty of users has the same problem. But other than assigning a letter to it, and formatting it, which I tried both (the most popular answer to the issue), I cant get it to work.

Like I've stated, everything else works perfectly fine on these ports. I have no reason to believe it's the ports or it's drivers. To double check that, I reinstalled the driver for the ports using the driver disc that MSI included with the notebook.

Does anyone have a workaround?

Cat

Is the HD pinned as a Master, Slave or Cable Select? The manual (Page 6) says it must be pinned to Master, many come set to Cable Select. Also of course it requires additional external power as the USB 5V is not enough.

As for the power, the enclosure includes a power adapter. I've never had to use any jumper settings in the past when assembling a backup drive in this manner. In fact, this makes the 3rd one that I've assembled, one of which was of the same brand enclosure, but it was a USB 2.0 one.

That's weird, the drive shows (and works) perfectly when plugged into the one USB 2.0 port that I have, yet doesn't when plugged into the USB 3.0 ones. However, USB 3.0 is new to me.

I'll go to the WD site and see how to set these pins. BTW, what do I do them with? I have some alligator (or roach) clips, but these may be too large to work in a small area like this.

Cat

If I'm not mistaken as I have a Caviar Blue 500 gb. lying around. It's a sata drive not a ide driver. Sata doesn't have any jumper's to configure. Cat try disabling you av and see if tha helps. For installing or updating any drivers for hardware, always disable your av first. After drivers installed, restart pc and re-enable av.

Here is an example. If you have jumpers they will look like that example and there will be instructions on the drive telling you how to pin it for Primary, slave, and cable select - make sure it is set to primary.

I've had drives that don't want to detect initially.

I don't understand why but I have attached USB drives that Windows 7 didn't detect until after I loaded Disk Management.

I have reason to believe it's the data cable that's the problem, not the jumper settings. The reason that I say this, is that while trying to get it going, by formatting (again), the drive showed up when I simply leaned against the data cable. There are a couple of places on the cord where it's obviously been pinched.

Then after discovering this, I removed the SuperSpeed cord, replaced it with a standard cord, and WOW! The drive showed up in the format that I selected (Backup).

Like I previously stated, I've assembled 3 of these drives, Nibs showed me how, he even found this particular enclosure for me to purchase. He never instructed me to change any jumper settings, I've always assembled the backup drives, and Windows (and even Linux Mint) recognized them off the bat.

Plus, during the researching that I've done, I cannot find any instructions on WD's site for changing jumper settings on this drive. It's a WD Caviar Blue WD3200AAJS 320GB SATA HDD.

I'm going to contact Newegg in the morning to see if they'll send me a replacement cable. Hopefully, they won't have me send the entire unit back. But then again, they may, I don't know.

Thanks for all of the responses and advice given. Hopefully, I can have this backup drive going soon.

Cat

As brkkab123 mentioned the SATA drives don't have jumpers.

I'm confident that it's the data cable in question here. For some reason, it'll work on the USB 2.0 port, but not the 3.0 ports. But once I switched the cable to a standard one, it did show up, I went through the motions of doing a backup with Todo Pro, and it was ready to backup.

Then I swapped the proper data cord back on, and it acted up again. It's either the cord, or the unit. Being that it works on the USB 2.0 port, I suspect that it's the cord. Or the fitting on the casing that the data cord attaches to. It may be best to swap the unit for another.

It's not my ports, if it were, then my BYTECC USB 3.0 to eSATA adapter wouldn't work, or it would work slow. It works normal (fast).

Cat

I'm just going to send the whole enclosure back for another one. Now it won't show up on either port, with either cord. Something is wrong with the entire unit, I believe.

So I replaced it (the HDD) back into the enclosure that I had originally bought for it (a USB 2.0 one), and it works perfectly, in both the 2.0 & 3.0 ports. Naturally, it won't run at 3.0 speeds, but my point is, the HDD is OK.

I've never had to deal with Newegg on returns before, I hope that I don't get the runaround over it, especially considering that I've spent over $1,000 there this year alone.

Cat