Problem accessing USB RAID drives.

[dgeasan]

With a Surface Book I bought in April 2016, running Win 10 1607, I cannot format or use USB RAID drives . I have tried two different vendors of two drive RAID enclosures. In each I have installed two Seagate 8TB Barracuda Drives. Both enclosures support Raid 0, Raid 1, JBOD, and Combined configurations. The SB cannot utilize any of the configurations. I can create a partition but formatting NTFS always fails and I get a RAW file system.

However, I can format and use both enclosures on a six year old HP Elitebook 8540W also running Win 10 1607. When I connect the drive formatted by the HP to the Surface Book, I can see the drive and Disk Management recognizes the drive as formatted. However, I cannot copy any files to the drive. The progress screen is displayed but nothing is happening.

So it seems like the USB ports are having an issue. I have connected the enclosures to both USB ports on the Surface Book as well as all four USB ports on the Surface Dock but no joy. Both enclosures are supplied with USB 3 cables. I have also tried with a USB 2 cable but no joy.

I've seen some mention of the SB USB ports not having enough power. Would that be the issue? Both enclosures are powered with separate power supplies so I would not expect this to be the problem, but maybe.

I can connect and use 4TB USB drives that contain only one disk.

Any ideas out there?
DG

 

[toaf]

can you give the drive a drive letter?

 

[dgeasan]

I cannot. Anything action that writes to the disk fails.

 

[toaf]

there seems to be a few issues with windows 10 and those drive, ill keep on poking around. I'm assuming, you're plugged into power while trying it.

 

[dgeasan]

Yes. Both enclosures are powered. I've since tested with a powered USB 3 hub but no joy. And as I noted originally, both enclosures work on a six year old HP laptop running Windows 10 version 1607 (Anniversary Edition) with USB 2 ports. So I'm not convinced it is a Windows 10 problem. Appears to be confined to Surface Book USB 3 ports.

 

[toaf]

well...I found this...

Western Digital has found that a small number of newer computer systems with USB 3.0, have a USB 3.0 Redriver vendor ASIC (Application-specific Integrated Circuit) - particularly with Intel USB 3.0 and Renesas (formerly NEC) host chipsets, when used with our USB 3.0 products with Initio CP48 Gen2 and Jmicron CP48 (FW 1.014 or higher) device controllers - may have problems interacting with the advanced power management features of the WD USB 3.0 drives.

is the surface book by default all locked down on power management stuff? even if its not a WD drive set I would think it would be good to look into.

Use: Control Panel; Power Options; Change Plan Settings and under USB Settings, change 'USB selective suspend' to Disabled.

ill keep poking around until we get you going...once again I have a drink waiting for me after you get going

 

[dgeasan]

Yesterday I bought and connected an unpowered USB 2 hub (4 port Insignia). Elsewhere in this forum I saw a suggestion to try this. And it works! I can now read and write to the drive no problem. Average write speed reported by Windows Explorer is around 45 Mb/s so probably not USB 3 speeds. Two days ago I had tried this with an old Tripp-Lite USB hub that I'm guessing is USB 1 vintage and that did not work. So there is some very specific magic happening in each of these USB versions.

So now I'm not sure where the problem is centered. Is it Windows 10? The Surface Book USB 3 ports? The external disk enclosures? The hard drives in those enclosures? Your last post implies the drives?

As to power management, where do I start to unhook the Windows Power Management on the drives? Yesterday I did turn off power management on the USB Serial Bus Controllers using Device Manager but that made no difference with the drive enclosure directly connected to the USB 3 port.

Thanks for your replies.