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GPT partition issues

Z

zalazin

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 12, 2000
Messages
1,655
I have 3 USB 3.0 docking stations. 2 Xigmatek single drive units and a Sabrent Ec-HDD2 dual drive unit with cloning capability.Each has a Seagate 3TB drive formatted in GPT mode. However I cannot access the drives from the Xigmatek unit in the Sabrent or vice versa. Also the drives will all show up as unallocated space in the disk manager. They only show up properly in the Xxigmateks or Sabrent stations they were initialized and formatted in. The Sabrent unit also shows 16MB of unallocated space at the beginning of each drive. The Xigmatek units shows no unallocated space. The Sabrent also will not start up with both drives inserted you have insert the second drive hot and then it works. The weird thing is though that the Sabrent goes to sleep after a few minute but has no problem waking up both drives. I don't believe its a power issue because of this. I would thank that drives formated in docking stations would be interchangeable. I emailed Sabrent about this but have not heard anything yet been four days...Anyone got any info.. PS MBR drive 500, 2TB, etc work fine and are interchangable in all the docks

Specs

HP I7 Haswell Laptop, 8GB Ram 2GB Nvidia 740GT (optimus w Intel 4600) 24GB SSD cache and 1TB hdd. 4 USB 3.0 ports. Win8.1 all latest drivers.etc, Avast av Malware Bytes premium edition w realtime protection no optical drive I use external when needed.
 
Some questions:

Did you make sure that all units can properly handle >2 TB drives? There are some USB contollers that cannot handle them (using only 32 bit variables for sectors)! This is the most likely issue.

Were the smaller drives also tested with GPT or only with MBR?
 
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My other thought is 4k sectors. I know that some USB external drives (I have a few of these) present 2+ TB disks as 4K physical / 4K logical sectors to work on XP and other OSs without the need for GPT. However this causes a problem if one puts data on the disk then rips it out of the enclosure to plug it in to a normal sata port. In this case when plugged into an SATA port the drive reports 512 byte logical sectors and can not read the data created with 4K sectors.
 
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Whenever you put a bridge controller in the mix, anything is possible. The SATA<=>USB bridge may not support 3TB drives as omni stated. They could also (especially on the one with built-in mirroring capability) maintain their own non-standard offsets to keep metadata etc (I have seen this with some of the Vantec units in the past.
 
I just took the drives out of the Sabrent and hooked those to a motherboard, I then used diskpart to clean them. I then reinitialized them and formated then as GPT, They worked fine in the Sabrent docks no unallocated space now, however if I put them in the Xigmatek docks they show up as GPT protected partition. All 2TB or smaller drive were in MBR mode.
The controller for the Xigmatek dock is ASTM 1051 the Sabrent is Prolific atapi-6 bridge C CC29.
 
I think the Asmedia ASM 1051 did not have >2TB support from the beginning but quick googling suggests that there is a firmware update. You can try to find a firmware upgrade from Xigmatek or somewhere else in the web. Sadly it is no longer listed on the Asmedia site.

EDIT: I went out of my way and found you this site: http://drivers.hardware-guy.com/drivers/Asmedia/ASM-1051/
I can't really help you further as I don't have a comparable dock/case.
 
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Found a firmware update for the Xigmatek dock Now I can read the drives I formated in mainboard. However the Xigmatek can not read the drives originaly formatted in it. Foturnately I only did one of my Xigmateks. I am currently moving files to the Sabrent drive that were done on the mainboard. 4 Tb from the two Xigmatek drives. I learned this, use a mainboard to format the 3Tb or higher. When I flash the firmware on my other Xigmatek the drives will be compatable with all the docking stations.

Thanks for all the info

The only thing I don't like is the Sabrent will not power up 2 drives at once, I still have to put
drive 2 in hot, but once in the Sabrent will wake both drives from sleep. Guess I will have to live with that.
 
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