Hard drive (SATA) making trouble when connecting via USB

Question

I have a hard drive from Western Digital (model: WD2500BEVS-75UST0) that is running without visible problems inside my laptop connected with SATA. However, once I connect it with an external case that converts SATA to USB, I have troubles. The external case that I am using is: BIGtec 2.5" USB3.0 Portable SATA Hard Disk Enclosure (BIG152).

First of all, I formatted the disk when I use a direct SATA connection to my laptop (tried NTFS and FAT32 file system). Then, when I plug the hard drive to my Linux Mint laptop using USB (with the BIGtec Enclosure), it does not become automatically mounted but shows up in the disks utility. However, the filesystem is not recognized there and the format option is visible, but does not work. To investigate the situation further, I was running fdisk /dev/sdb in terminal (sdb is the hard drive connected via USB) and get the following message:

fdisk: unable to read /dev/sdb: Input/output error

Does anybody have an idea what I could further try? I am already using the BIGtec enclosure for another hard drive (NTFS file system) where everything works fine. Do you think it might make sense to try a different enclosure anyway?

Thanks for any responses!

Update #1:

I would like to additionally emphasize that the drive does spin up! Furthermore, here you can see a picture of the two hard drives that I am using and also of the SATA->USB connector. Both hard drives are very similar and I could not even find out the real difference. However, as depicted, the left drive is recognized and mounted without any problems while the right drive is recognized but cannot be mounted nor formatted.

By saying that the right hard drive is recognized, I mean that it shows up using the Disks tool under Linux as you can see in the screenshot.

On first sight, it seems like the file system is not even recognized. That's why I tried to format it with NTFS file system. What you see is the failure message and that magically a (physically not existing) second hard drive shows up in the Disks tool. I really don't have any explanation what's going on here...

As I also was concerned that the hard drive might broken, I was running an extensive badblocks test while connecting the hard drive directly to the SATA port of my laptop. The test that I was running I called by

badblocks -vsn /dev/sdb

and the result that showed up after more than 12 hours testing was

Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found

Thus, the drive seems to still be working correctly... Any suggestions?

Update #2:

According to Jarmunds suggestions, I did the following:

First: I ran the lsblk /dev/sdb, output is

NAME MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb    8:16   0 232,9G  0 disk 

Second: When connecting the drive via USB in windows, the drive spins up, it seems like windows looks for drivers for the drive and installs them successfully. However, there is no drive appearing in the file explorer. Thus, I went to the disk management utility which told me that the drive needs to be initialized (see following screenshot).

No matter which of the two options I choose, a CRC error appears (sorry for the German).

Afterwards, the disk is shown in the utility but as it has not been initialized correctly, it is also not possible to format it.

Third: dmesg right after connecting the device returns:

[17152.892960] usb 3-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[17156.597275] usb 3-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=5106
[17156.597282] usb 3-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
[17156.597286] usb 3-1: Product: AS2105
[17156.597290] usb 3-1: Manufacturer: ASMedia
[17156.597293] usb 3-1: SerialNumber:      WD-WXEZ07H42312
[17156.598247] usb-storage 3-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[17156.598687] scsi12 : usb-storage 3-1:1.0
[17157.595759] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WDC WD25 00BEVS-75UST0    01.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[17157.595988] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[17157.596173] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/232 GiB)
[17157.596412] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[17157.596414] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[17157.596648] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[17157.596652] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17157.599898] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[17157.599904] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17157.600434] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[17157.600438] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb]  
[17157.600439] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[17157.600441] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb]  
[17157.600442] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] 
[17157.600445] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb]  
[17157.600447] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error
[17157.600449] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: 
[17157.600450] Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[17157.600457] blk_update_request: 154 callbacks suppressed
[17157.600458] end_request: critical medium error, dev sdb, sector 0
[17157.600460] quiet_error: 154 callbacks suppressed
[17157.600462] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 0

Note that the lines starting from Medium Error[current] are shown repeatedly in the following lines of dmesg that I didn't paste in here

Thank you a lot for your support here Jarmund!!

Update #3:

Out of desperation I organized 2 additional External HDD Enclosures to test whether it might work with a different hardware. The ones I tried now were:

• SITECOM USB 3.0 SATA 2.5" hard drive case
• ICY BOX USB 2.0 SATA 2.5" External HDD Enclosure Model IB-231StU

I specifically decided to take one working with USB 2.0 and one with USB 3.0. However, as none of these worked neither, I decided to sell my hard drive to people who want to use it with the SATA interface directly. Thus, I won't be able to test out future suggestions.

Solution

I had a similar problem using 4 of this cases and 2 of this hard drives. Only one of the 4 identical cases accepted a WD30EZRX drive. When attached through the other 3 cases, the computer reported a 2.2 TB hard drive and a 0.8 TB hard drive of unknown partition table – instead of a single 3 TB drive with intact GPT partition table. I found out that the vendor of the cases only supports hard drives up to 2 TB capacity (using that type of external case) and so I think I had just luck having 1 working case.

Long story short: Be sure that your case vendor supports hard drives of your desired size.

Comments

[tc88]

The thing is that the drive actually does spin up. I edited my original question adding some more details, pictures and screenshots, maybe you have another idea?

[Jarmund]

@tc88 While this is a setback, I'd like to at least try to pinpoint the error. Updated my answer accordingly.

[tc88]

To your question whether fdisk /dev/sdb gives me I/O Error, I have to answer with yes. I already also mentioned that in my question. For the other approaches you suggested, please see Update #2

[tc88]

Thanks a lot anyway! I guess I cannot mark your post to be the correct answer as the problem has not been solved right? Once I find a solution, I will come back here and tell about it...

[tc88]

Well I think the size of 250GB should not have given any trouble as I bought the cases at a time when TB hard drives already were around. However, meanwhile I sold the drive to be used as an internal drive. I would keep the thread open anyway in case that somebody faces similar issues...

[user3389669]

@tc88: I tried also this case using the above mentioned drives – although the case supports drives up to 8 TB, mine did still not work. Technical support of Sharkoon found out, that the internal usb chip set has problems with the WD••EZRX series in general. So maybe you had also just a bad combination of disk and case. However, I'm posting this just for following readers.

[tc88]

If I remember correctly I even tried one or two additional cases apart from the one shown in the picture of my first post. After those also didn't work, I decided to sell the drive. I'm sorry that I didn't document the test of the other cases. Thanks for your remarks anyway!