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WD Caviar Green in external enclosure only functional in USB 2 ports
Hello all
I recently sold my stationary, but decided to keep my internal hard drives and turn them into externals so that I would be able to use them with my laptop for backup and long-term storage.
I ended up buying two Raidsonic Icy Box IB-373: IB-373U3
My hard drives are 2TB and 4TB, both Western Digital Caviar Green.
Now, when I plug the 4TB drive into either of the two enclosures, it works perfectly fine in my USB 2 port, but when I plug it into my USB 3 ports it is extremely slow, and often times out, when I try to copy anything to it. It usually transfers a few MB's and then stalls, and then transfers again, until at some point it times out. I can easily watch videos that I have on it though.
I have tested my USB 3 ports using another USB 3 enabled external drive and it worked perfectly fine and achieved expectable speeds, so I know my ports and my laptop are not at fault.
My question is whether this could be a problem with my hard drives? It seems unlikely that both the enclosures would be faulty, but it could be. Sadly I cannot test my 2TB drive before I have backed everything up on it, but I will be doing so shortly and then testing it. Until then, any help or tips is greatly appreciated.
Edit: the other external I tested with was a 2.5" kingston SSD in an external enclosure that followed when I bought it.
I just remembered now that the first time I plugged my 4TB external into one of the USB 3 ports it worked fine, although at USB 2 speeds. I have not been able to replicate this since.