Ext, USB Drive Ltr Assignments change Int. Drive Ltr Assignments

Hello, is it just me or does anyone else find it extremely annoying that drive letter assignments can't be locked in disk management?

I have 4 ext. usb 3.0 drives in dual docks that are part of my backup box setup. Occasionally during boot up it appears that one or more drives get connected at different times and Winders just helps itself to reassigning letters, sometimes injecting them before internal "hanging off the bus" drives. This really screws up the works since I have a number of things pointing to these specific drives for various reason and they expect them to be there or things get ugly.

Is there any way to nail down drive assignments no matter what order they connect in so S: drive is always the same Disk x?

TIA

As far as I know if you assign the USB hard drives letters far outside the normal range of drive letters they will always get those letters when connected. For example, start at Z: for the external drives and work your way backwards.

Hi, Yeah, that's what I normally do. From Z backwards I start with the ROM's (including a few virtuals) put them at the end and then the reader drives since they always are well behaved and stay put.

Sticks, docks and the like are the problem children. I've tried powering them all up prior to bootup to see if they would repeat assignments after the physical drives and for the most part they behave, but occasionally they stray and these are storage drives with references pointing to them.

I'll try loading them from the backend forward and see if there is difference while still having them powered up prior to booting. It really doesn't matter what they are labled as long as they repeat consistently. Thanks for the insight.

I'm surprised, not really, that MS hasn't considered this and added support for hardwiring assignment configurations functionality in USB storage considering it's in big use right now more so than in the past. We can only put so many drives in a box or NAS and RAIDing drives is either a waste of space or a spanned dataset catastrophe waiting to happen from where I sit.

I'll stop back in after I try it and let you know how it went. Thanks!