I have many large HDD's and a few SSD's in 3 systems so I often need to access drives with a USB 3.0 enclosure or adapter. All my drives are being converted to GPT, where I've now discovered there is a problem accessing them from a different interface (whether USB or SATA or Nvme) if they were not initiated and formatted on that interface. Troubleshooting an inaccessible drive lead me here. The proposed solution:
If this is the best solution can someone recommend an affordable external adapter and/or enclosure to use? (Under $200, preferably under $100.)
Another idea would be to add eSATA ports to all of my computers and never use anything but eSATA connections externally again. Kind of ridiculous we'd need to go to this extreme. Laptops are going to be a challenge. Practically everyone has old HDD's sitting around. How is this problem not well known?
Now I'm scared to death to touch my hard drives externally at all.
The actual solution to the problem is to use a SATA-USB adapter that has a hardware SATA controller. For example, the adapter made by Anker has a hardware controller and will correctly function with SATA drives over 2TB initialized on a normal SATA port.....
...Practically, all adapters with software controllers are incompatible with the actual SATA spec and miss-translate the sector information.
If this is the best solution can someone recommend an affordable external adapter and/or enclosure to use? (Under $200, preferably under $100.)
Another idea would be to add eSATA ports to all of my computers and never use anything but eSATA connections externally again. Kind of ridiculous we'd need to go to this extreme. Laptops are going to be a challenge. Practically everyone has old HDD's sitting around. How is this problem not well known?
Now I'm scared to death to touch my hard drives externally at all.