Already assigned and active drive letters being reassigned

WallyZ · 13 May 2016

I have many systems in house that have dual USB hdd docks. These normally have two drives installed.

I have assigned specific drives letters via disk manager.

However when another USB storage device is added the drive letters for the two active drives in the dock will instantly be changed.

This occurs even when both drives are copying between each other. This is really screwing up my applications and backups.

Is there a way to prevent this from occurring?

dalchina · 13 May 2016

Hi there is a simple trick that may help:

In diskmgmt.msc, change the drive letter of a drive of interest to (e.g. x - late in the alphabet so you're not likely to need it otherwise).
Now you will find every time you plug that drive in it will be assigned the same letter.
I use this for my backup drive for disk imaging (which everyone is strongly advised to use)

Repeat for other drives using other letters if it works for you.

Note: I don't know how using a dock may affect this compared to plugging it in directly.

WallyZ · 15 May 2016

It mentions in my original post that I have specifically assigned drive letters via disk manager.

This doesn't seem to help.

It appears when 2 USB devices have been setup this way and have conflicting letters the OS gives preference to the newly added device.

I believe when there is a conflict it should be first come is first served.

dalchina · 16 May 2016

I see what you mean now.. can only suggest you assign individual letters to individual drives. I suspect it would be optimistic to expect different or better behaviour, unfortunately.