[solved] USB3-SATA dock/cradle/adapter for 3.5+2.5" hdds w/o 4K/sect. emulation?

[Greybeard]

Can anyone give me any advice on choosing a USB3-SATA dock/station/adapter for 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives that can easily handle drive sizes of 4TB and larger?

However, 4K sector size emulation should not be used as I want to access hard drives that have been removed from a PC and have already been internally partitioned and formatted in the PC (512 bytes/sector).

I already have the dock shown in the photo, but it works with 4K emulation, so the HDDs formatted in the dock and in the PC are not interchangeable.

SOLUTION:
Reflashed firmware of my old Sharkoon SATA QuickPort XT USB 3.0 dock:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/which-usb3-sata-dockcradleadapter-for-3-52-5-hdds-without-4ksec-emulation/msg5459084/#msg5459084

[fzabkar]

Good luck with your search. I have yet to find a vendor who knows anything more about their product than the price and how many they can move.

[coromonadalix]

never had any problems with sata / ide dock  and many removed hdd from pc's,  from old era w9x  and up  ...

if the controller is recent enough say   2tb support and more,   it should support any hdd formatting / partitions   GPT boot    etc ...

unless you deal with very weird ones that i dont know ?   even recovered some unix drives ..


buy from Amazon, you can return it ??  or your local computer store

[fzabkar]

never had any problems with sata / ide dock  and many removed hdd from pc's,  from old era w9x  and up  ...

I have seen hundreds (?) of cases in various storage forums.

USB adapters silently change the sector size:
https://www.klennet.com/notes/2018-04-14-usb-and-sector-size.aspx

[Greybeard]

coromonadalix:

I partitioned and formatted a 4TB hard drive in the PC (Win10).
Result: It is accessible in the PC (detects 512 bytes/sect.) but NOT accessible on my USB dock.
Problem: I can't access HDDs that have been removed from a PC.

I partitioned and formatted the same 4TB hard drive in my USB dock.
Result: It is accessible on the dock (detects 4KB/sect.) but NOT accessible in the PC.
Problem: If my USB dock breaks, installing HDDs in a PC won't allow me to access the HDDs formatted on USB dock.

[David Hess]

I have never had a problem with the drive or sector size.  I picked up an Orico external hard drive docking station for that kind of work:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B6ZYSG1M/

[alm]

Are you sure it's the USB dock that's emulating 4k sectors, and not your motherboard emulating 512 byte sectors? As far as I know modern, larger drives all use 4k sectors. Just some drives emulate 512 byte sectors in firmware and other expose the 4k sectors directly.

I'm surprised a GPT partition table would care about sector size beyond partition alignment. What does the partition table look like on the "inaccessible disk"? Does it claim the partition table is not valid? What does parted -l show when booted into Linux from a live USB stick while the disk is "inaccessible"?

[Greybeard]

Are you sure it's the USB dock that's emulating 4k sectors, and not your motherboard emulating 512 byte sectors?

I used the wmic diskdrive get BytesPerSector,Model command.
I made screenshots of the results at my other PC I can access and upload in the evening today.

The HDD is a WD40EZAZ.
I think the emulation to 512 bytes is done by the HDD electronics, but I'm not 100% sure...

https://shop.x-hardware.de/4000-GB-Western-Digital-WD-Blue-WD40EZAZ/22667
"Sektoren: 4KB mit Emulation (512e)"

https://drivesolutions.com/western-digital-blue-4tb-5400rpm-sata-iii-6gb-s-256mb-cache-3-5-desktop-hard-drive-wd40ezaz.html
"Advanced Format: Yes - 512e (emulation) 4096 (4Kn native) Logical Data Block Length"

I'm surprised a GPT partition table would care about sector size beyond partition alignment. What does the partition table look like on the "inaccessible disk"? Does it claim the partition table is not valid? What does parted -l show when booted into Linux from a live USB stick while the disk is "inaccessible"?

Inaccessible disk means: No drive letter is shown and Windows Disk Management asks "should the disk be initialized?".
I've not tried to look at the partition table nor used Linux tools, but Windows 7/10 did not claim a not valid partition table.

[coromonadalix]

@ Greybeard

When you format a drive, sure some default values will be pushed onto the drive    fat 32 ntfs  etc ....  GPT   is the new gimmick to be able to BOOT on BIG drives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

But normally a good dock, will follow the drive formatting and access it, multi partitions too .... 

BUT  if it's a Mac drive or Linux partitions,  say in windows you need to have the proper tools / and drivers etc ... or other os'es,   and theses can play small tricks, sometimes Windows will not show them ...

And when this happens  you need software who will access the drive in raw mode and do recover or clone   etc ..    once again you have to get the proper SW for that, and they don't work all the same way ...

Same for hardware, if you work with older stuff, you'll get hardware limitations too, controller side, capacity ...   motherboards ..     

I have a bunch of ide to sata / sata to ide drives cards, who are able to read old drives

Ebay few bucks $$$ china junk, who work pretty well  some PCI slot promise ata (IDE) cards    usb docks ...  usb floppies,  but dont do 720k 

I had to restart an very old TEK scope (20-25 years) with Win98, WinME, Win2k would crash,  boy it was a nightmare finding all the needed stuff, motherboad locked out ...   floppies in 2024 ? using  some "plop"  boot disk to install usb drivers at a DOS  level ??   and finding genuine CD-Roms was a nightmare too,  no burned iso's would work ...


And yes the infamous  do you want to format the drive may happen, witch i do refuses right away

if the mbr is bad / defective, that's another story


As for your dock story, i never saw that behavior, and i would say try to find another dock,  and buy a more recent one who at least goes beyond 4 TB, there are at 8TB or 12TB models

Sorry to say, but as i wrote earlier,   i recover very old drives with an WAVLINK   or my IOcrest 8 slot  tower,  they certify 48 bit lba   ... and do 4tb and up even old 4 8 20 30 40 80 gig models worked very well ? i have a drawer full of drives 2.5" 3.5"  ide and sata 1 sata 2   


BUT   for your problems   i can not say,  it can / could happen to me too,  there is so many things who can go wrong ...

As for @fzabkar    link  for  usb enclosures who change specs,   i never experienced that     i would say:   the usb  chip / interface is not good enough,  but when it is possible,  i always connect to the motherboard IDE or SATA  interface,  never use any external interface(s) unless in deep  sh@@$



The drives i use right now are :   swapped between the dock / tower / and hot-swap caddies in my computer,  formatted by win 7 win 10 win 11    i have no problems at all and between computers too ??  maybe i'm lucky ?

[coromonadalix]

oh in the old days   

you had to play with sectors,  head quantity   ...  etc .. to set the drive capacity and format it properly  ...  even on old mfm rll   ones,  and  the time you had to use DOS debug commands to access the controller and do the formatting  .... some controller where pretty powerful

old times

[Greybeard]

What do you think about this:
Could I reformat the HDD from 512 emulated bytes/sect (512e) to 4K native (4Kn) to make mainboard and USB dock handle the HDD correctly?
Is there a WD specific tool to do that?

[coromonadalix]

Don't want to be rude, nor offensive

But i don't like your "emulated" thing,  it's done automatically given on the "formatting" normally when you choose FAT / NTFS / GPT   etc ..   and all should be fine.
The hdd controller knows what to do ...  i never played with theses settings, nor force a setting ?


What i'm saying is :

EX:  if the drive is seen and ok in a machine, say you boot from it, form a connected ide or sata port   ... or formatted it, non bootable, just storage,  and say put lots of files in it to do some tests

And after, you put it into a dock  and the dock don't see any partition or don't mount the drive properly, you don't see files ...  the dock is the problem ... it's an hardware compatibility problem of some sort ??

The only problem i see so far, many docks wont let windows boot from it (if the drive was booting directly connected)  maybe due to BIOS restrictions, secure boot ...  or use legacy mode ... even if you select boot from usb ...  even tried some usb to nvme / sata interfaces ...

So far only  usb floppy and usb keys are booting fine in my case ?


For the drives at some point in the past you had drives managers softwares made by Ontrack or WD format tools, Seagate, Hitachi and many brands had them, but in them i never saw changing the formatting parameters

But now     you rely on the OS to do the job, do scandisks of defragment the drive  etc ...

you have free partition managers and paid ones,  some can migrate entire systems, manipulate partition sizes, clone   etc ...  tried many,  i have a bunch of them.



And last   

it will depend on the OS and or the hardware too,   you had  128gb limits and other things too in the past,  from the DOS era, windows 3 and up, old windows can not cope with bigger partition sizes etc ...   you have to search for that

the old scope i restarted had theses limits over 20 gig of size,  it went bezerk if i tried bigger,  it had an 6.4 gig drive in it ...
etc ...

[fzabkar]

There is no such thing as a "good dock" or a "bad dock". Some will present a fixed 512-byte physical sector size to the USB host while others will present a fixed 4KB physical sector size. Still others will use 512-byte sectoring for drives with a capacity less than 2TiB, and automatically switch to 4KB sectoring for drives larger than 2TiB.

The reason for this behaviour is so that large drives can be used with legacy OS-es such as Windows XP. Since Win XP is limited to MBR partitions, the maximum number of sectors it can address is 2^32. At 512 bytes per sector, that works out to a capacity of 2TiB. However, if the sector size is increased to 4KB (= 8 x 512B), then XP can see a USB mass storage device with a capacity of 16TiB. This was how Seagate approached this problem with their early external drives. WD's My Book externals can be "fast formatted" to present either sector size to the host.

Note that these USB bridges behave the same way whether the drive is a 512n (native) or 512e (emulated) model. That is, it has nothing to do with whether the drive is an Advanced Format model with 4KB physical sectors.

Also, it should be said that some modern high capacity SATA and SAS drives are now shipping as 512e models but can be fast formatted to 4Kn by the user. This requires a specific utility, usually supplied by the manufacturer, although it is an ATA standard feature.

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/enterprise-performance-savvio-fam/enterprise-performance-15k-hdd/_cross-product/_shared/doc/seagate-fast-format-white-paper-04tp699-1-1701us.pdf

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Format#Advanced_Format_hard_disk_drives

If your SATA HDD supports multiple logical sector sizes and the optional ATA command SET SECTOR CONFIGURATION EXT (e.g. Seagate drives advertising FastFormat support), you can use hdparm to change between the supported logical sector sizes.

[Greybeard]

@ coromonadalix
I think we're talking at cross purposes.
I don't need to boot from the HDD, I just need to access data.

i would say try to find another dock

That's why I am here...
I just want to find a dock that reports sector size the same way the mainboard sees without using a USB dock.

Also, it should be said that some modern high capacity SATA and SAS drives are now shipping as 512e models but can be fast formatted to 4Kn by the user. This requires a specific utility, usually supplied by the manufacturer, although it is an ATA standard feature.

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/enterprise-performance-savvio-fam/enterprise-performance-15k-hdd/_cross-product/_shared/doc/seagate-fast-format-white-paper-04tp699-1-1701us.pdf

Does the Seagate tool also work with WD drives?

[fzabkar]

Does the Seagate tool also work with WD drives?

The tool is SeaChest Utilities. I don't know if it works with WD's drives, but WD/HGST has Hugo, Niagara and wdckit.

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detailweb/a_id/50708/~/wdckit-drive-utility-download-and-instructions-for-internal-drives

wdckit Top Features

    Show:
    List the details like disk#, serial number, capacity, state, geometry, protection, progress, version, statistics, and more.

    Format:
    Does a format on a SCSI/ATA device to change sector size.

    Update:
    Updates the drive with new firmware.

Note that an ATA FastFormat is not the same thing as WD's "fast formatter" for its USB drives. The latter reconfigures the bridge firmware whereas the former reconfigures the HDD.

See this thread for even more quirky USB bridges:

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/i-have-several-hard-drives-that-work-in-one-pc-but-show-as-uninitialized-in-another-pc.3503743/#post-21181059

This "Verbatim USB 3.0 SuperSpeed Desktop Hard Drive 3TB" is enumerated as 2 "virtual" physical disks, 2.2TB (= 2TiB) + 0.8TB. BIOS shows 2 USB devices. The enclosure contains a single 3TB HDD.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/external-usb3-3tb-drive-shows-2-devices.648875/

[Greybeard]

Why does it always have to be as complicated as possible?   

Are there really no docks that simply pass on the sector size unchanged?

[coromonadalix]

I would say too many hardware makers, even if they say  "compatible" ... you do know it's a big word   

Technology change so fast 


As for a bootable Windows 10-11 drive: now you have 3-4 partitions  listed  .... loll   see in disk management,  minimum is 3 ... 

The main  called C:\  and other hidden ones for boot and recovery   ...  and  Acer and some other brands hide an recovery partition with an windows re-installation media in it  ...  you will never see it normally in windows,  some partitioning SW  will show it ... 

ex:  if you wipe a drive like this, but not destroy all partitions to merge them as one,  you'll get some lost space  around 600meg for an windows drive converted into a storage one ...

[Greybeard]

Are you sure it's the USB dock that's emulating 4k sectors, and not your motherboard emulating 512 byte sectors?

I used the wmic diskdrive get BytesPerSector,Model command.
I made screenshots of the results at my other PC I can access and upload in the evening today.

Screenshots as promised:

[alm]

So it is indeed the enclosure that does the translation. And the problem is that the partition table is in units of sectors, so the partition offsets will be wrong.

I'd make sure all partitions are aligned on 4k boundaries (should happen automatically when partitioned on the USB dock). And when you need to access a disk directly, use a method like this to mount the partitions. I'm pretty sure the method could also be adjusted in the other direction (4k partition table on 512b disk). Alternatively you could use a tool like Testdisk to reconstruct the partition table.

Using 4kn disks sounds like the better solution long term. You could also do the research for what USB to SATA bridge ICs do translation and which don't.

[fzabkar]

As a workaround to this translation problem, you could use the demo version of DMDE:

https://dmde.com/

DMDE will show your partition with a [4K] identifier, indicating that it was created in a 4Kn environment. In the Partitions tab, just d-click your FS volume, expand the $Root, and then r-click and "recover" your desired files to another drive. The free version will recover up to 4000 files of any size from any one folder per click.

[Greybeard]

To be honest, I don't feel very comfortable using disk editors or modifying boot sectors, etc.

Using 4kn disks sounds like the better solution long term. You could also do the research for what USB to SATA bridge ICs do translation and which don't.

That's why I asked for a tool reformatting the 512e HDD back to 4K.
I think I will ask WD support.

How can I find out what USB to SATA chipset is used by my old Sharkoon SATA QuickPort XT USB 3.0 dock or the potential new ones?

[coromonadalix]

Chip:    Jmicron JMS567  given on the maker site  loll

Some reports on some sites,  reliability problems and other quirks with this chipset  ??


if you're in windows :  check in device manager the dock should be enumerated .... and on it check its properties / hardware id's /  and do a search on its vid / pid informations

maybe  before that you can see it in the taskbar,   mine  is giving away the information when i have an hdd in it 

i see asm xxxx  when i want to disconnect an hdd from usb port

[Greybeard]

I've opened the case of my Sharkoon SATA QuickPort XT USB 3.0 dock and confirmed the Bridge IC:

ASMedia ASM1051.

I found several firmwares on this site:
https://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/en/component/remository/Drivers/Asmedia/ASM-105x-115x-215x-(ASMT-xxxx)-Sata-USB-3.x-controllers/ASM1051-Sata-USB-3.x-controllers/lang,en-gb/
https://www.station-drivers.com/index.php/en/component/remository/Drivers/Asmedia/ASM-105x-115x-215x-(ASMT-xxxx)-Sata-USB-3.x-controllers/ASM1053-Sata-USB-3.x-controllers/lang,en-gb/
http://37.187.91.32/index.php/en/component/remository/Drivers/Asmedia/ASM-105x-115x-215x-(ASMT-xxxx)-Sata-USB-3.x-controllers/ASM1051-Sata-USB-3.x-controllers/lang,en-gb/

But I'm not sure which one could be the correct one.
Some named Asmedia ASM-105x (photos show ASM1051) , one is named Asmedia ASM-1053 (maybe wrong IC type, shown photo is unreadable)

I try to contact the dock maker again to get more info and/or firmware...

PS:
Original FWAsmedia ASM-105x SATA/USB 3.0 Firmware Version 100824_91_00.
Found the "nearly" original Asmedia ASM-105x SATA/USB 3.0 Firmware Version 100824_00_00
http://37.187.91.32/index.php/en/component/remository/func-startdown/510/lang,en-gb/

PPS:
Found the original FWAsmedia ASM-105x SATA/USB 3.0 Firmware Version 100824_91_00:
https://www.usbdev.ru/?wpfb_dl=2056

And many many others:
https://www.usbdev.ru/files/asmedia/asmt2105firmware/

[coromonadalix]

oh  another hardware ?  mmm   i have doubts,  normally    you have to check your windows device manager  where it enumerates,  hardware properties  ....

your station drivers  show firmwares links  not drivers ...  normally theses  install by themselves

if you don't have any exclamation marks in device manager,  you are ok 


pls  do check device manager  before installing any gimmick  ...

[madires]

On linux you can use the hdparm tool to select the logical sector size (if supported by the disk). First check the disk:
  # hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep 'Sector size:'
  Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes [ Supported: 512 4096 ]
  Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes

Then change to 4k:
  hdparm --set-sector-size 4096 /dev/sda
Re-partion and re-format.

What happened in your case is that the disk is set to 512e, i.e. the disk is emulating 512 byte sectors, and the USB-SATA bridge is emulating 4k sectors on top. Besides some bridge chips always emulating 4k sectors there are also chips only supporting 512 byte sectors (a disk with a logical sector size of 4k wouldn't work).