I just bought three Thermaltake Silver River 5G enclosures. I bought one a few years ago and it has performed great. I installed a HDD (3TB Toshiba with movies on it) into one of the new enclosures and Windows Explorer did not see it. I went into Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management and the drive was listed, but it was offline. I initialized it, but it showed that the HDD was not partitioned (100% unallocated). I then installed the HDD, connecting it to motherboard, Windows Explorer showed the HDD and I could read the files. I tried the other two enclosures, same thing, nothing. I even tried the older Thermaltake enclosure with same results. I installed another 3TB Toshiba HDD (partitioned and formatted, empty) and Windows Explorer didn't see that drive either. I went into Disk Management and initialized the drive, created a new volume and then formatted it. Windows Explorer now sees that drive and I can copy files to it and play movies from it. I pulled that HDD from the enclosure and tried it in the other two new enclosures and they work.
In the past I've always been able to install a HDD (already used containing data) into an external USB enclosure and just plug it in and use it. Those were probably USB 2.0, though. Am I missing something? I'm going to try hooking up that 3TB HDD that was configured while installed in an external enclosure to see if it will still be readable.
Bookmarks