External HDD Error When Initializing

[JakeMan314]

Recently I found an old TV Receiver in perfect condition with a 320GB MAXTOR drive underneath it. The receiver had worked perfect before, the hard drive working just fine. I decided to pry out this drive and use it for some well needed space.

I purchased a SATA 22 pin to usb connector and plugged it into my windows machine. I needed to initialize it, in which I attempted to, but it threw me: Data Error (cyclic redundancy check). Mind you the drive has not been initialized, so it has no letter at all. I have tried as much as I possibly can to get this thing to work.

S.M.A.R.T will not work at all because of this error. I have noticed that it is very quiet, and perhaps not receiving the power it needs. I am not looking to recover data, I just want storage space. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Here are ALL the specs:

External HDD: MAXTOR S ABRE USB DEVICE
Picture: https://ibin.co/3B41sBBybDLS.jpg

Connecter: Inateck USB3 to SATA Converter
Picture: https://ibin.co/3B42fVgEM0g2.jpg

OS: Windows 10 (Or Mac) (Or even Linux)

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey Jake.

Try connecting the drive internally, via a standard SATA connection, to see if you'll get different results. I know that most diagnostic tools can't recognize drives which are not initialized, but give it a go with some of the options offered by this article, to see if at least one of them will be able to check the SMART data and/or perform a test on the drive: https://www.lifewire.com/free-hard-drive-testing-programs-2626183.

Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD