I thought all my troubles with the three 3TB MyBook Essentials were over, but unfortunately they’re not. Now I no longer get any errors in the device manager, all drivers and controllers appear to be OK, the drives mount fine, but when I copy to and from them, they randomly stop and unmount. I mean, I could copy 2-3 files and them bam! Gone. Sometimes I could be luckier and copy 10-15 files, and then suddenly the drive is no longer recognized. The only way to remount the drive is to power it down and then back up. This is not acceptable.
I verified the firmware and they all have the latest. Tried to switch to “performance” in “policies” and it’s actually even worse: they unmount as soon as I start the copy, not a single byte is copied. Like I said before, no drive letter conflict and no signature conflict.
Tried to run all possible diagnostics too, the drives are fine, no errors, no other physical problem.
Tested the three drives on my HP Envy 17 (2012 model), which has 3x USB 3.0 ports and everything worked fine.
Went back to the desktop because obviously the problem was there. Tried various combinations of hubs and finally found one configuration that works: one drive attached to one of the mobo’s USB 3.0 ports, one of the hubs attached to the other and the remaining two drives attached to the hub. I will have to discard the second USB 3.0 hub. Oh well, you can’t have everything…
I have no way of knowing whether the three drives would work trouble-free on the desktop if connected directly to the mobo, because the latter only has two USB 3.0 ports. But since they do work fine on the laptop, I have to presume that the culprit was indeed the hub.
I had similar issues on some other systems. Not quite like that, but close enough. The solution for me was to purchase a high quality USB card. This supported like 6 or 8 ports and any combination of peripherals then worked flawlessly.
USB 3.0 is still a new technology and there are bound to be subtly different implementations. And in the USB 2.0 arena, there are still hubs and cards that have internal conflicts with routing the traffic.
You want a nice hub with a good Multi-Translation-Translator design philosophy. Especially if you are working with external disks. You won’t find it in the 5.99 wal-mart bargain bin. Expect to pay about $40.
Could this explain why I can’t connect both my primary “My Book Essential” 3TB external hard drive and the secondary “My Book Essential” 3TB external hard drive? I’m trying to make a complete back-up of my primary drive and I can’t seem to get both drives to show up in my computer at the same time. I have a relatively new (albeit cheap) laptop with USB 2.0 (not 3.0) and I tried remapping the drive, but, the same thing happened. Then when I unplugged the first drive and plugged the second drive in it showed up with the remapped letter, as if it was the first drive. I’m not using a hub, I’m using the three USB 2.0 ports that are built in to the computer.
Do I need to do something else to solve this issue so I can have both drives connected at the same time so I can complete my backup copy? I don’t have enough drive space on my laptop to do a complete copy and it will be a pain in the butt doing it one piece at a time.
I don’t know if this will help, but it did for me:
Open your start menu
Right click “Computer”
Click “Manage”
Click “Disk Mangement”
Find the drive marked “offline” this should be whichever drive you connected second.
Right click “offline” and click “online” the drive should now be added with a new drive letter.
