2
1
We have got several Captiva SATA to USB 2.0 external enclosures which used to work fine with 1 and 2 TB Hitachi drives. Now, Hitachi is gone so we had to switch to a different manufacturer and choose Seagate, especially their Barracuda 1 TB and 2 TB (ST2000DM001 / ST1000DM003) drives.
We partition and format drives by connecting them on an SATA controller in a Windows XP box and also copy data on them using SATA directly. Afterwards they are supposed to be put into the external enclosures to be shipped to customers.
This used to work fine with the Hitachi drives, but with the Seagates (both 1 and 2 TB variety) Windows XP claims that they are not formatted when connected via USB. (Linux also shows a rather weird partition table.)
If I put these drives into the external enclosures and partition and format them there, they seem to work fine, but copying 2 TB of data via USB 2.0 is not really an option. If I then connect the drives formatted in the external enclosure directly to an SATA controller, Windows claims that there is a small, unformatted partition on them and quite a lot of unpartitioned space.
The drives work fine in a USB 3.0 enclosure, so there must be something weird with this particular combination. My guess is that the USB SATA bridge controller does something stupid, like remapping the sector numbers but apparently only with the Seagate drives. So the only option is probably to get different drive enclosures.
Any other hints?
(I tried to use more descriptive tags but usb-sata does not exist and SuperUser does not allow me to create new tags.)
Thanks for the answer, but for me it no longer matters. We got rid of these drive enclosures years ago (the question is from 2012) and are now only using USB 3 ones. – dummzeuch – 2016-09-28T14:31:57.477