How do you diagnose drive vs enclosure issues?

M

maxiedaniels

Gawd
Joined
May 25, 2005
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I have two Startech USB3.0 UASP bays hooked to my 2013 Mac Pro. Today I decided to try installing Yosemite on an unused drive I had sitting around. When I went to use Time Machine to backup my current boot drive, I started getting read/write errors.

This is where I'm getting lost: my SMART status on that drive says it's all good, but then the SMART status on the *other* drive in the bay showed it's about to fail. Weird, that drive hasn't had any issues. Regardless, I backed up my failing drive to another drive and removed the failing drive.

Yet, then when I go to Time Machine again, I get an unknown error ~10 minutes in. So I try to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my boot drive to my backup drive - CCC warns of read/write errors. What?! Ahhh.

I don't believe this is Apple specific: how do you sort out whether it's your enclosure or your drive causing issues? I'm very close to just buying a new enclosure on Amazon and returning it if it turns out it isn't the issue.. but surely there must be a more efficient way of figuring these things out.

Are Startech bays even reliable?
 
The only real way is to pull the drive and hook it directly up to a machine. (via SATA, not usb and an enclosure)

Can't really say much one way or the other on Startech.
 
I can't - new Mac Pro doesn't have direct SATA (admittedly, really really frustrating). That's the thing - I used to be fine with these issues because I *could* hook directly to SATA.

Maybe I'll bring my drives home to my PC computer and try running some tests there...
 
No PCI-E slots in the Mac Pro for a SATA controller card?

How about trying a different brand USB-SATA enclosure based on a different bridge chip? I've had OK luck with USB 3.0 enclosures based on chips from Prolific (used by WD and Seagate) and Genesis Logic, although with the latter an earlier version Bytecc controller card was tweaked in voltage and was incompatible with some drive (I can't remember), perhaps because the Genesis chip was an older version.
 
larrymoencurly said:
No PCI-E slots in the Mac Pro for a SATA controller card?

How about trying a different brand USB-SATA enclosure based on a different bridge chip? I've had OK luck with USB 3.0 enclosures based on chips from Prolific (used by WD and Seagate) and Genesis Logic, although with the latter an earlier version Bytecc controller card was tweaked in voltage and was incompatible with some drive (I can't remember), perhaps because the Genesis chip was an older version.
Click to expand...

Not for the (seriously overpriced) trashcan models.
 
I just bought a few Mediasonic USB3 enclosures because I was troubleshooting and figured out that CCC and Time Machine both failed when my drive was plugged in through my Startech bay, but it would work fine through my Mediasonic.

But I just had a random disconnect on my USB3.0 enclosure, *and* my system starts up very slow suddenly...
 
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