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I have an external USB3.0/eSATA to SATA dock. When connecting a 2TB HDD to a Dell M4700 running Windows 7 x64 Professional, the drive works as expected both over USB and eSATA. When I swap to a 10TB HDD, the data on that drive is inaccessible. Executables throw an error about not being 32- or 64-bit while images and documents fail to load. Connecting the same drive over USB3.0, everything works normally.
On a Dell M4800 running Windows 10 x64 Professional and a custom Desktop running Windows 7 x64 professional, both the 2TB and 10TB drives work normally over USB3.0 and eSATA.
While I suspect some sort of chipset incompatibility, I haven't found any information to suggest this could be the case. I have 2 of the M4700s, and they both have the same issue. I completely reinstalled the OS and latest drivers on one of them just to make sure there wasn't some incompatibility with the other software on the system.
When first connecting the 10TB drive to the M4700s, the laptops would complain that drive was not ejected properly (even though I had), so I ran chkdsk on the drive and that issue seems resolved but the data remains inaccessible.
I have not tested with any drives of in-between size, but I will update this post if I do.
sippybear
Posted 2017-04-07T22:52:29.260
Reputation: 294
I always thought eSATA had a limit on capacity to 3TB - Not sure. Can you try ubuntu to see if you get the same effect? Sounds like you should get in touch with DELL – JohnnyVegas – 2017-04-07T23:43:54.490
Sounds like a limitation of the SATA to USB controller being used. Except you claim it actually does work on another machine so that can't be it. – Ramhound – 2017-04-08T00:11:57.010