Hitachi HDS72101 external drive not recognized

JohnSF said:

I've got two Hitachi HDS72101 1TB external drives that my new Dell XPS 8900 running Windows 10 won't recognize. The device manager shows the drives to be working properly and having current drivers.

My computer recognizes my new Seagate 5TB drive and my old Lacie drives (older than the Hitachis). I am able to see the Hitachi drives when I plug them back into my old Vista machine, an XPS 420, and thankfully I was able to copy files from the Hitachi to the Seagate. However, I still want to use the Hitachi drives as back-ups.

Is this a Windows 10 problem or a Hitachi problem, and is there anything I can do to work around it either way and get these drives working on my new machine? (I was unable to figure out how to contact Hitachi support.)

Hi JohnSF and welcome to Tenforums.

There could be a number of things going on with the Hitachi drives (although it's odd that this would happen to both, at the same time). Some things to try:
1. a different/better USB cable
2. check the USB ports for looseness/movement
3. Look in Device Manager Disk Management and see if they have drive letters assigned; if not, try assigning
4. it's possible the internal PCBs are going bad; removing the drives and replacing them in new cases may solve the problem (using a SATA2USB adapter would prove this true/false)

Contact Us : Hitachi America, Ltd.

Glad you were able to get your data backed up! :)

JohnSF said:

I appreciate the Hitachi consumer contact info and have emailed them for info. The drives and cables are mechanically fine and still work when I plug them back into my old Vista computer. I was unable to figure out how to assign a letter to the drives, but I'll look into it further this evening.

Change, add, or remove a drive letter - Windows Help


I read that someone actually switched to a more robust cable, when having the same problem as you, and that resolved the issue, so thought I would mention it.

Hope Hitachi customer service can help you! :)

JohnSF said:

No help from Hitachi.

JohnSF said:

My computer says the disks aren't initialized, but I know that to be false since they each have around 700GB of data on them, and the data shows up when I plug them into my old Vista computer.

Well, since you've got your data off them now, why not go ahead and initialize them, to use with the W10 computer then? I would also check their health, just to be safe before depending on them.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Where did you get those 2 Hitachis from? Sounds to me that the 2 drives are in RAID configuration. You may need to disable RAID first before you can use them as regular drives.

JohnSF said:

I never set them up in a RAID config. I did my back-ups manually. Both drives still work fine on my old Vista computer.

I was just wondering if you salvaged those drives from an old XPS pc and used them as spare drives. You seem to have a lot of XPS machines and from my experience, most XPS desktops are on RAID 0 (at least before SSDs went mainstream).
I recently encountered an issue with 2 salvaged 1TB drives from Dell XPS machine having problems with the computer I am working on only to realize later on that it was set to RAID 0.