Plugable USB 3.1 Gen 2 SATA Vertical Hard Drive Dock

Modern hard drives and solid state drives include support for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART.  SMART data can show signs of drive failure or wear before data loss occurs and can be used to monitor the health of the drive including the temperature sensors in the drive itself.

From the Crystal Disk Info Graphical Utility

Crystal Disk Info can be downloaded from here, this is a 3rd party utility for viewing a drive’s SMART data in windows. This can be run without installation by downloading and extracting the ZIP file, or installed like many other applications.

Crystal Disk Info version 8.12.6 and above includes built-in support for these Plugable Products:

• USB-C Toll Free NVMe Enclosure
• USB-C SATA Vertical Dock
• USB-C 2.5-inch SATA Adapter

After extracting the zip file, right-click on “DiskInfo64.exe” and select “Run as Administrator” to start the application with Administrative permissions required to read the SMART data from the drive.

From the Command Line with smartctl

The smartctl command is provided in the smartmontools suite. This can be downloaded and installed for Windows or Linux. The current stable version 7.2 released December 30 2020. The latest daily build can be downloaded from here, these are built from the latest source code and include support for newer chipsets not available in the 7.2 release.

Smartmontools version 7.2 and above includes built-in support for these Plugable Products:

• USB-C Toll Free NVMe Enclosure
• USB-C SATA Vertical Dock
• USB-C 2.5-inch SATA Adapter

Installation and Running

1. After downloading the smartmontools-7.2-1.win32-setup.exe, right-click on the file and select “Run as Administrator” to start the installation.  Follow the on screen steps to install smartmontools.
2. Open a terminal, right-click on the start menu and select “Windows PowerShell (Admin)” from the pop-up menu
3. Type in `smartctl --scan` to list the available drives
4. To output all of the drive’s SMART data, type in `smartctl --all /dev/sdn` where /dev/sdn is the first column from the scan output for the drive to be read
5. Optionally, output this to a file the desktop using the following: `smartctl --all /dev/sdn > $env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\smartdata.txt

If you receive an error “Open failed, Error=5” most likely the Windows PowerShell was not run as Administrator.

Modern hard drives and solid state drives include support for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or SMART.  SMART data can show signs of drive failure or wear before data loss occurs and can be used to monitor the health of the drive including the temperature sensors in the drive itself.

From the terminal with smartctl

The smartctl command is provided in the smartmontools suite. This can be downloaded and installed for Windows or Linux. The current stable version 7.2 released December 30 2020, Fedora 34 provides the latest version through DNF, however both Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS 8 provide an older version that does not support all of our storage products. The latest daily build can be downloaded from here, these are built from the latest source code and include support for newer chipsets not available in the 7.2 release.

Smartmontools version 7.2 and above includes built-in support for these Plugable Products:

• USB-C Toll Free NVMe Enclosure
• USB-C SATA Vertical Dock
• USB-C 2.5-inch SATA Adapter

Downloading and running

1. Download smartmontools from your repository using the following commands:
   1. For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Pop!OS: `sudo apt install smartmontools`
   2. For Fedora or CentOS: `sudo dnf install smartmontools`
2. To scan for detected drives run the following command: `smartctl --scan`
3. To print all SMART data for a specific drive use the command: `sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdn` where /dev/sdn is the path to the block device.
4. Optionally, this output can be saved to a file using the following: `sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdn > ~/smartdata.txt` for detailed examination

Downloading and running the nightly build

If your distribution has not updated to smartmontools 7.2, then running the nightly build is the easiest way to read SMART values on our USBC-NVME enclsoure, smartmontools 7.1 supports both our USB-C SATA adapter and vertical drive dock.

1. Download smartmontools latest build for your system from the nightly builds webpage here https://builds.smartmontools.org/
   1. For modern x86_64 computers I recommend: 'builds/smartmontools-linux-x86_64-static-7.3-r####.tar.gz' where #### depends on the build number.
2. Extract the contents of the tarball using the following command: `tar -xf smartmontools-linux-x86_64-static-7.3-*.tar.gz`
   1. This creates a file structure in the same directory as the smartmontools tarball file.
   2. Navigate into the file structure with the following command: `cd ./usr/local/sbin`
3. To scan for detected drives run the following command: `./smartctl --scan`
   1. Please note, the './' preceding 'smartctl' tells the shell to run the command from this directory, rather than searching the PATH for the 'smartctl' command
4. To print all SMART data for a specific drive use the command: `sudo ./smartctl --all /dev/sdn` where /dev/sdn is the path to the block device.
5. Optionally, this output can be saved to a file using the following: `sudo ./smartctl --all /dev/sdn > ~/smartdata.txt` for detailed examination

Windows 10 enables Trim for both internal and USB connected SSDs with supported host controllers, devices, and file systems.  Windows 10 supports Trim on USB storage devices that support UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol) and with either NTFS or ReFS file systems.  Some early USB 3 host controllers may not support UASP or Trim correctly.

To check if Trim is enabled in Windows 10 please try the following:

1. Launch Windows PowerShell with Administrative Permissions ( Right-click on the Start Menu and select "Windows PowerShell (Admin)"
2. Allow the application to run as administrator through Windows User Account Control
3. Type in the following command to check the value for DisableDeleteNotify
   

   fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

4. If DisableDeleteNotify is set to 1, we can enable Trim with the following command
   

   fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

To manually run Trim or to modify the automatic schedule:

1. Open the Windows 10 Start Menu and type "optimize" into the search box
2. Select "Defragment and Optimize Drives" app from the search results
3. The Optimize Drives window shows connected drives that can be optimized
4. Select the USB connected SSD from the list and then press the "Optimize" button to manually start trim
5. Use the "Change settings" button to adjust or schedule Trim on the drive

Alternatively Trim can be run manually from the command line:

1. Launch Windows PowerShell with Administrative Permissions ( Right-click on the Start Menu and select "Windows PowerShell (Admin)"
2. Allow the application to run as administrator through Windows User Account Control
3. Type in the following command, where X: is the drive letter of the external device to run Trim at the command prompt
   

   defrag /o X:

Apple macOS enables Trim for internal Apple SSDs only.  Advanced users can also enable Trim for USB connected SSDs with Apple APFS formatted partitions.  Apple macOS runs Trim when the file system is detected by the operating system, this is either on device connection or system restart, Apple does not provide a manual Trim tool like with Windows or Linux.

Enabling Trim in macOS

Open a terminal (Finder > Go > Utilities > Terminal) and enter the following command:

`sudo trimforce --enable`

This requires administrative permissions to run and you will need to enter your password to continue.

A long warning will be presented, please read this fully.

Enter ‘Y’ to continue, or ‘N’ to cancel

Trim can be disabled with the following command:

`sudo trimforce --disable`

Verifying Trim on macOS

Apple macOS does not have a function to manually run a Trim command, instead it is run when a supported drive and supported file system is detected by the operating system.  We can check to verify Trim is running on a drive by performing the following:

Open a terminal (Finder > Go > Utilities > Terminal) and enter the following command:

`log show --start $(date +%F) | grep -i spaceman_trim_free_blocks`

This may take a moment to complete, I recommend expanding the window to full screen for easier reading.

Each output line represents a file system that has been trimmed on today’s date, here is an example line:

2021-08-13 07:16:07.556498-0700 0x2b2d     Default     0x0                  0      0    kernel: (apfs) spaceman_trim_free_blocks:3371: disk3 scan took 0.000614 s, trims took 0.000000 s

The specific drive is “disk3” in my example, we verify that disk3 matches the external drive by comparing to the output of this command:

/dev/disk3 (synthesized):

/dev/disk3 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +160.0 GB   disk3
                                 Physical Store disk2s2
   1:                APFS Volume ⁨Intel160⁩                774.1 KB   disk3s1

Trim Support in Linux

Modern Linux distributions support the TRIM and DEALLOCATE commands for SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs respectively, for simplicity we will refer to these two commands as Trim in this article.

These commands are filesystem dependent and supported on the following file systems:

When a file is no longer needed by the file system, the TRIM command can be sent to the SSD to help the built-in garbage collection utility determine which memory locations need to be maintained and which can be ignored. Maintaining unnecessary memory locations takes time and can slow down read and write access to the drive.

Most current Linux distributions use fstrim.service and fstrim.timer to coordinate periodic SSD maintenance with TRIM. However USB connected SSDs do not automatically have TRIM enabled, instead requiring some manual configuration. The TRIM command can be issued manually using the fstrim command, for example the following code will run Trim on compatible file system mounted to /media/user/USBSTORAGE. Please note, all code examples in this document require root permissions unless otherwise noted.

fstrim -v /media/user/USBSTORAGE

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS automatically mounts USB storage to /media/{username}/{storage volume name} while Fedora 34 automatically mounts USB storage to /run/media/{username}/{storage volume name}. The fstrim command can be run using these automatic mount points after enabling Trim for the USB storage drive.

Verify Trim Compatibility on the External SSDs

Our first step is to check for Trim support on the SSD, this requires installing the sg3 utilities package:

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

sudo apt install sg-utils

Fedora 32

sudo dnf install sg_utils

Next we can run the sg_vpd command to check for unmap support, in the following command /dev/sdX is the path to the block device for the USB connected SSD (this can be found by checking the `dmesg` output after connecting the drive or with the `lsblk` command)

sudo sg_vpd -a /dev/sdX | grep "Unmap"

If the command returns the following line then we can enable Trim on this device.

Unmap command supported (LBPU): 1

Enable Trim on the External SSD: Temporarily

We can enable Trim on the SSD until the drive is either disconnected, or the computer is restarted with this command, with sdX again being the block device for the USB connected SSD:

echo unmap | sudo tee /sys/block/sdX/device/scsi_disk/*/provisioning_mode

To enable Trim on Plugable's SSD docks, adapters, and enclosures on every connection

For our USBC-SATA-V: USB-C Vertical Hard Drive Dock

Our USBC-SATA-V USB-C Vertical Hard Drive Dock supports both TRIM and SMART for docked SATA SSDs.

Run the following command to enable TRIM when the enclosure is connected to the computer:

echo 'ACTION=="add|change", ATTRS{idVendor}=="174c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1153", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_disk", ATTR{provisioning_mode}="unmap"' | sudo tee --append /etc/udev/rules.d/10-uas-discard.rules

USBC-SATA24: 2.5-inch SATA SSD TRIM

Our USBC-SATA24 USB-C 2.5-inch SSD and HDD Adapter supports both TRIM and SMART for connected SATA SSDs.

Run the following command to enable TRIM when the enclosure is connected to the computer:

echo 'ACTION=="add|change", ATTRS{idVendor}=="174c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="55aa", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_disk", ATTR{provisioning_mode}="unmap"' | sudo tee --append /etc/udev/rules.d/10-uas-discard.rules

USBC-NVME: USBC-NVME Enclsoure

Our USBC-NVME Tool Free M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure supports both TRIM and SMART for installed NVMe SSDs.

Run the following command to enable TRIM when the enclosure is connected to the computer:

echo 'ACTION=="add|change", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bda", ATTRS{idProduct}=="9210", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_disk", ATTR{provisioning_mode}="unmap"' | sudo tee --append /etc/udev/rules.d/10-uas-discard.rules

New hard drives and SSDs, including NVMe SSDs, need to be partitioned and formatted before the first use.  Windows will not prompt to format a blank drive when connected.

Start by installing the hard drive or SSD (referred to as "drive") into the Plugable hard drive dock or drive enclosure and connect it to the computer using the provided cables and power supply if applicable.

With the drive connected to the computer, we can create a partition table, and at least one partition, then format the partition.

1. Right-click on the start menu and select Disk management from the pop-up menu
2. If this is a new, blank drive, the system will prompt to initialize the drive by writing a partition table to the drive with the Initialize Disk dialog
   1. Uninitialized drives are listed under the Select disks: section, check all that apply
   2. For drives over 2TB GPT is required to access the full storage capability of the drive, we also recommend GPT for SSDs and drives used with other Windows 10 systems, MBR can be used for drives that need to be used with legacy Operating Systems, for example Windows XP
   3. Select OK to continue
3. The drive currently has no partitions, right-click on the Unallocated space and select New Simple Volume... from the drop-down menu to start the New Simple Volume Wizard
   1. At the introductory screen, select Next to continue
   2. At the Specify Volume Size screen, select Next to continue with the default value
   3. At the Assign Drive Letter or Path screen, select Next  to use the default values, this will assign the next available drive letter to the new partition
   4. At the Format Partition screen, select the File system from the drop down menu, NTFS is the default and works well with Windows computers, exFAT is also compatible with macOS and Linux*.  A Volume label can also be entered on this screen, this is the name of the drive.  We recommend leaving the other options at the default values, Quick Format should be checked
   5. Select Finish to start the formatting, it should complete within a few seconds to a minute depending on the drive
4. The drive should now be accessible within Windows explorer under My Computer

New hard drives and SSDs, including NVMe SSDs, need to be partitioned and formatted before the first use.  macOS will normally prompt you when a blank drive is connected with the option to Initialize the drive.

Start by installing the hard drive or SSD (referred to as "drive") into the Plugable hard drive dock or drive enclosure and connect it to the computer using the provided cables and power supply if applicable.  macOS will normally prompt you when a blank drive is connected with the option to Initialize the drive.

1. Either select the Initialize button on the prompt, or select Go > Utilities > Disk Utility, either option will open the Disk Utility
2. Select the external drive in the left column, then the Erase button to start the formatting process, please be sure this is the correct drive before formatting
3. The Erase Drive dialog drop down lets us name the drive and select the file system format from a list, the defaults are recommended
4. Select the Erase button to format the drive, this will take between a couple of seconds to minutes depending on the drive
5. The newly formatted drive can be used as a Time Machine backup, or used as a standard storage drive

Originally authored by: Jeff Everett, March 21, 2013

This post is intended to offer detailed technical information for troubleshooting issues affecting new “Advanced Format” 512e SATA disk drives. 

Plugable’s full-size 3.5″ hard drive docks, the USB3-SATA-UASP1, USB3-SATA-U3 and USBC-SATA-V; these feature support for these new 512e Advanced Format drives. Our Plugable Storage System “PSS” products also support 512e large volumes (as soon as 2.5″ drive capacities increase and these drives become available in smaller sizes than 3.5″).

Some docks have a non-standard sector emulation feature that enables using capacities above 2TB on Windows XP 32 bit. But this requires that drives initialized and formatted in a special way, and NOT be used with other SATA controllers in desktop PC’s or other drive docking stations, unless those units also have a matching firmware version and support for this feature.

Plugable USB SATA docks do not support sector emulation for XP.   Rather, we’ve chosen to support 3TB+ Advanced Format drives in the standard way without any emulation.

Background

The storage model used by disk makers for the last 10+ years is changing, and this post is an effort to explain how these changes work in detail. In case of issues moving drives between different systems, or when encountering issues using USB attached drives to host enterprise application data, the details here can help understand what factors are at play.  

Data is stored fundamentally in bits (bits with a little b). Busses like USB often measure throughput in bits, like USB 2.0’s 480 Megabits per second (480 Mbps) or SATA III’s Gigabits per second (6 Gbp/s). Eight of these individual bits of data make up one of the capital-B “Bytes” that we usually measure data in, be it kilobytes (KB) in a document, MegaBytes (MB) in an MP3, or GigaBytes (GB) of data on a storage volume like a hard drive or SSD.  Generally speaking, transfer rates industry-wide are measured in bits so transfer rates appear higher than if they were measured the same way the data is actually stored, in Bytes.

On modern solid state drives and traditional hard or even floppy disks, these bytes are grouped into sectors for actual read/write operations. Over the last decades, almost all storage drives used 512 Bytes per sector to store data since addressing individual bits and Bytes would be impractical.

Having all drives at 512 bytes per sector was nice, as there were few compatibility issues to think about when moving drives between systems or SATA docks, or when cloning them.

Evolution

512 byte sectors present problems with larger capacity drives (3TB+)- to make way for larger drives, sector sizes had to grow.  This presents challenges throughout the “software stack” from the SATA hardware controllers and their firmware, their drivers, the operating system, and even to how applications may sometimes assume certain sector sizes or where sectors will start.  Resulting issues are numerous and will take time for the industry to fully work out. 

Over the past few years, Advanced Format Drives (512e, AF) drives reporting 512 Bytes/”logical” sector while actually using physical sectors of 4096 Bytes/”physical” sector have gained in popularity due to their higher data density potential, and resulting larger capacities. For more on how these drives work and why the industry switched, read this great ZD net post.  Soon, we’ll be seeing drives that use 4096B logical and physical sectors.  

*from Microsoft support policy for 4K sector hard drives in Windows

As you can see from the table above, determining whether you have a 512n (drive with reported and physical sectors of 512 bytes), 512e (the 512 emulation 4096 “Advanced Format” drives with physical 4096B clusters), or 4Kn (drive with both reported and physical sectors of 4096B) is crucial to determine which Windows operating systems will be able to recognize the drive.

On OS X, large volume support is somewhat better, with effectively no limits on volume size in modern OS X versions:

*From Mac OS X: Mac OS Extended format (HFS Plus) volume and file limits

How to check your drive’s sector size

To determine if you have an 512e Advanced Format Drive, open an administrative command prompt and run the following command on the NTFS formatted volume:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo [your drive]

[your drive] will be the letter of the disk you’re testing, so c: or d: etc.

The output will look like this, with the bold portion below being the relevant information. Bytes per Sector of 512 and bytes per Physical Sector of 4096 indicate a 512e drive:

C:\Windows\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo h:
NTFS Volume Serial Number : 0x8a0c5e820c5e68e9
NTFS Version : 3.1
LFS Version : 1.1
Number Sectors : 0x00000001d1bcafff
Total Clusters : 0x000000003a3795ff
Free Clusters : 0x000000003a3671d7
Total Reserved : 0x0000000000000000
Bytes Per Sector : 512
 Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096
Bytes Per Cluster : 4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length : 0x0000000000040000
Mft Start Lcn : 0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn : 0x0000000000000002
Mft Zone Start : 0x00000000000c0000
Mft Zone End : 0x00000000000cc820
Resource Manager Identifier : DB59D441-7AD6-11E2-BEE8-00027232D73D’

If your drive reports:
Bytes Per Sector : 512
 Bytes Per Physical Sector : 512
This one of the 512n volumes commonly used over the last decade. Support for these drives is universal.

If your drive reports:
Bytes Per Sector : 512
 Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096
The volume is operating in 512e mode, and should be recognized by most Windows Vista (SP1 and later) systems, as well as by newer Windows 7 and 8 PC’s. Windows 7 and Server 2008 users who do not have Service Pack 1 installed need a system update for 512e compatibility.

Macs should also be able to see the volume with no issue, however do not have native NTFS write capabilities, so they may only be able to read the drive.

If your drive reports:
Bytes Per Sector : 4096
 Bytes Per Physical Sector : 4096
Then the drive has been formatted with non-standard sector emulation, in order to support 3TB+ drives on Windows XP.

A special release of firmware for the Plugable USB3-SATA-U3 (firmware v12092681f600) is available by special request that uses this non-standard emulation strategy. However, it is not the default and is generally not recommended as it limits moving the drive to other docks with the same emulation strategy.

How to clean and re-initialize a volume

Moving volumes initialized with 4096B sector re-emulation to other SATA controllers (other drive docks or PC SATA connections) may result in drives that are visible in disk manager but with no partitions, and no option to re-format the drive since the “new” (non U3) SATA controller doesn’t support the 4096B sector re-emulation.  In this case, wiping the drive is necessary to use it on the new controller. 

Wiping a misaligned drive’s partition table will allow the volume to be re-initialized as though it were new, and a new partition table may be written when the disk is re-formatted.

Performing the following steps will destroy all data on the disk selected, so these steps must be performed with extreme caution. 

To check for all attached volumes, open an administrative command prompt and enter diskpart, then enter the list disk command as shown below, and select the disk of your choice to clean. After selecting whichever disk number you want to wipe, the clean command will destroy the partition table and allow you to re-initialize the volume.

C:\Windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.2.9200

Copyright (C) 1999-2012 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: GRANDCENTRAL

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 111 GB 1024 KB
Disk 1 Online 1863 GB 0 B
Disk 2 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 3 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 4 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 5 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 6 Online 1862 GB 0 B
Disk 7 No Media 0 B 0 B
Disk 8 Online 465 GB 0 B

DISKPART> select disk 8

Disk 8 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> clean

DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.

DISKPART>

From here the disk is blank and can be re-initialized and formatted with whatever partitions are desired.  Most consumers will not need to be aware of the other issues that can arise with Advanced Format volumes in enterprise applications.

Partition Alignment

If the performance of your 512e large volume has degraded when being moved from system to system, partition alignment issues may be the cause.  Issues with non-bootable cloned volumes may also be due to improperly aligned partitions. Western Digital and Hitachi offer drive alignment utilities for affected operating systems. Seagate drives should not require alignment. Customers with other brands of drives will need to check with the manufacturer of their drive to determine if an alignment tool is available and/or necessary.  Partition alignment issues often affect older Windows Vista and Windows XP systems where drives are frequently accessed on other operating systems.

Before initializing a new drive, using a large volume with Windows XP, or especially before cloning an Advanced Format Western Digital drive, please check the chart below to determine if aligning your drive is necessary for maximum performance and compatibility with your software environment.

Using your WD Advanced Format Hard Drive with a Windows Operating System may require you to run the WD Align Windows software utility after you install your operating system or partition and format the drive as a secondary drive. The WD Align software aligns existing partitions on the Advanced Format drive to ensure it provides full performance for certain configurations. (Please see table for configuration details)

Running Hitachi’s “HGST Align” tool may be necessary for Windows XP or Windows Vista users. Windows 7 and Windows 8 users should not need to use this utility.

Windows support in the enterprise

Most end-users won’t need to worry about drive sector sizes, partition alignment, or any of the details above. Due to the specific issues documented by Microsoft with some of their enterprise applications, thorough planning for drive purchasing and migration is crucial in enterprise environments leveraging the following technologies:

• Hyper-V: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2515143
• Microsoft SQL Server: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/01/13/sql-server-new-drives-use-4k-sector-size.aspx
• Windows Home Server v1: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2385637
• Microsoft Exchange Server: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee832792.aspx#Phys
• Third-party applications and hardware: Applications and hardware devices may have reliability and performance issues when they are connected to these new drives. Contact your application and hardware vendors about their support policy for these drives.

*from “Microsoft support policy for 4K sector hard drives in Windows.”

For more details on 512e and 4Kn Advanced Format support across Windows versions, application specific issues, other known issues, and unsupported scenarios, read Microsoft support policy for 4K sector hard drives in Windows.

Further details on the evolution from 512n to 512e and 4Kn drives are available in this presentation from IDEMA (International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association).

Deeper technical details for driver developers are available in Microsoft’s “Advanced format (4K) disk compatibility update (Windows)” article.

Originally authored by: Joshua Henry, March 12, 2015

It’s happened to almost all of us at one point, your computer or external hard drive fails and panic sets in. Perhaps your files haven’t been backed up yet or this drive is the only backup. One way or another, you made it to us and bought one of our docking stations. Now what do you do?

Because one of the most common reasons for buying a Plugable hard drive docking station is to recover data off of a SATA hard drive from another computer or external hard drive enclosure we wanted to talk about some issues our customers frequently experience. The following steps apply to our USBC-SATA-V, USB3-SATA-UASP1, USB3-SATA-U3, and our entire Plugable Storage System lineup. They also apply to hard disks that are installed inside your computer and potentially other docking stations/enclosures/adapters.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that data recovery is often best left to trained technicians and anything you do to recover data on your own could make recovering the data impossible, even for a data recovery specialist.

If you are trying to set up a new blank hard drive and are encountering issues, please see this post here.

Internal Hard Drives

Our hard drive docking stations are quite useful for recovering data from a desktop or laptop computer because they support both 2.5" and 3.5" SATA hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). If you’re able to remove the drive from the computer to insert into our dock, you’re on your way to accessing the data. With that being said there are always scenarios where this may not be true. There are many factors that can cause data to be inaccessible. Assuming for the moment that the hard drive in question hasn’t failed completely and is not part of a RAID array, chances are our dock should be able to help access data off the drive.

Here are some common trouble scenarios for recovering data from an internal drive in our dock:

• Complete drive failure. This is fairly self explanatory, the drive itself has mechanically or electronically failed causing the drive to not be detected by our dock.
• Pending drive failure. HDDs and SSDs often fail slowly, most commonly encountering what is known as bad sectors. This can lead to data corruption making data recovery extremely difficult or impossible. Other factors can also be present but are usually less likely such as intermittent electronics on the circuit board, failing drive bearings, etc.
• Partition / filesystem damage from improper shutdowns, viruses, etc.
• Incompatible filesystem(s) with the host data recovery computer. For example, Windows systems cannot natively access data from Mac or Linux/Unix formatted drives, we’ll touch more on this later.
• Drive is part of a RAID array like RAID0, RAID10, RAID5, or RAID6. A drive from a RAID1 array is the only kind of RAID drive our docking station can potentially recover data from.
• Whole disk software based encryption such as Microsoft BitLocker / EFS, TrueCrypt, and others.
• Specialized backup and partition software such as Norton GoBack and some versions of Acronis can cause issues and should be removed/disabled if possible prior to data recovery.

External Hard Drives

Hard drives extracted from external enclosures or drives used in other docking stations will have many of the same potential issues that we just talked about for internal drives but do introduce other new scenarios. A typical scenario is the power adapter or USB port on an external drive has failed. The hard drive inside the failed enclosure is removed and the ‘bare’ drive is inserted into our hard drive docking station to attempt recovery. Or sometimes a drive that was used in another dock is inserted into ours or vice versa.

Here are some common scenarios with for recovering data from an external drive in our dock:

• All of the above scenarios from our Internal Hard Drives list apply.
• Whole disk hardware level encryption. This can be in the form of a drive sold intentionally to protect against data theft or unintentionally where what consumers believe are standard hard drives from companies such as Western Digital (the most commonly found in our experience) are written to using a form of proprietary hardware encryption which prevents the drive from being read in any enclosure except for the one the drive shipped with.
• Sector emulation. See our Understanding Large SATA Drive Compatibility blog post for more details. “Some docks have a non-standard sector emulation feature that enables using capacities above 2TB on Windows XP 32 bit. But this requires that drives initialized and formatted in a special way, and NOT be used with other SATA controllers in desktop PC’s or other drive docking stations, unless those units also have a matching firmware version and support for this feature. Plugable USB SATA docks do not support sector emulation for XP. Rather, we’ve chosen to support 3TB+ Advanced Format drives in the standard way without any emulation.”

Determining if your Drive is Healthy or Failing

One of the first steps is finding out if the drive you are trying to recover data from is in good health. Often a drive appears to be working fine until you try to copy large amounts of data. Sometime common signs of a failing drive are during a transfer a file cannot be read and the data transfer may fail, often with a cryptic error such like “Cannot copy my.file: Data error (cycle redundancy check)”, files could transfer but be corrupted, transfer speed is much slower than expected, and/or the drive drops offline during transfers requiring the dock to be reset.

Usually the first course of action would be to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive. This can indicate signs of failure in a drive like bad sectors or read/write errors. There are several free (or free trial) utilities available for Windows and Mac that can be found online. Here’s what we recommend:

• Windows – CrystalDiskInfo (free)
• Mac – SMARTReporter (free to try, $4.99 in the Mac App Store)
• Windows/Linux - smartmontools (free/open source)

If the drive appears healthy after checking with a SMART utility but is obviously showing signs of irregular behavior, we recommend to download and install the advanced diagnostic utility from your hard drive manufacturer. Unfortunately for Mac users this isn’t an option. Here are some common drive manufacturer diagnostic links for Windows:

• Hitachi – Windows Drive Fitness Test
• Seagate – Seatools
• Western Digital – Data Lifegard Diagnostic for Windows

Determining the Filesystem of the Drive

A common scenario we run into is a customer will take a hard drive out of another computer or device like a network attached storage (NAS) device and try to recover the data with our dock only to find that the host computer can see the drive but can’t actually read the data on it. For a Windows user this would be apparent when looking in the Device Manager and seeing the drive listed, but the drive not being mounted and accessible from Windows Explorer. A Mac user would similarly check in Disk Utility for the drive if it is not accessible from the Finder.

The first step is to identify where the drive came from prior to being used in our docking station. Was this drive from another Windows computer? Was it from a Mac, or perhaps a Linux computer? How about a NAS device or external hard drive? By knowing this information we can look for information about what type of filesystem is on the drive.

Next you’ll need to find out if your computer can support the filesystem of the drive in question. Here’s a basic list of what filesystems are supported by OS:

• Windows XP (with proper update installed) and higher can read and write to FAT(16), FAT32, ExFAT and NTFS.
• Mac OS X 10.6.5 and higher can read and write to FAT(16), FAT32, ExFAT, and HFS+ (Mac OS Extended Journaled or Case-sensitive, Journaled). Mac OS X 10.3 and later can only read but not write to NTFS (write can be enabled, but it is not recommended as it may be unstable).
• Linux (Ubuntu for example) can read and write to FAT(16), FAT32, ExFAT (with the proper package installed), NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, JFS, and XFS. There other filesystems but they are far less common and not available for every Linux distro by default: BtrFS, ReiserFS, UFS (Unix), ZFS.

Knowing what filesystems are supported will help you decide how to proceed. If you’re a Windows user and find the hard drive you need to recover data off of is from a Mac, either you need to install some 3rd party software to read it, or simply recover the data on a Mac system. If you’re a Mac user, you should be able to read data off of a Windows computer drive without issue.

The hardest part is recovering data from a Linux formatted drive on a non-Linux computer. Whether you’re a Mac or Windows user, chances are if you’ve got any kind of NAS device in the home, it will be using a filesystem your computer cannot natively read. In our experience most consumer grade NAS units use EXT2/3/4 filesystems. For Windows users we recommend installing some 3rd party software. For Mac users, take a look at this blog post done by CNET.

If you have any questions at all, please comment below or email support@plugable.com. We’re happy to help!