External USB3 3TB drive shows 2 devices?

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Do you mean this?

Step 1: You have to initialize the disk to GPT partition table, Please use a third party utility to write zero's to the drive.
Step 2: Open disk management , Start menu> right click computer> click manage> click disk management
Step 3: Locate the verbatim drive on the lower right and right click on it to initialize the disk , Select GPt partition table.
Step 4: Right click on the black line and select New simple volume.
Step 5: follow the on screen instructions to create a single 3TB partition.
Click to expand...

I have been nuking the device for about a week now :). It never completes, always some error but eventually no difference shows in Windows Disk Management. Been buzy GPT:ing too :)

Besides, that answer shows two things. They did not understand the problem and they do not want me to "follow up". I know this because they do not acknowledge the fact there are two "disks" (magical 1 and magical A) and they give me a number that does not work in Finland. I do not know which Verbatim Support this was but it was not the Finnish one.

If I would know how to annihilate one or the other magic disk this problem would go away.
 

Feel your pains : )
 


Thank you, I am really glad this is mostly just hobby 😀. I'll waste some time with this but most likely also learn something.
 


I think, this is good way to learn, can u return it and/or try WD or Seagate?
 


Well, this is not broken and those are more expensive. Could not find another USB3 drive even close to this price. Bought from Germany, plain HDD costs over 200e in Finland, when this whole device cost only 150e in Germany.
 
Olotila, you say that "nuking with zeros with USB3 gives throughoutput >300 000 MB/s and USB2 ~30 000 MB/s according to DBAN".

Don't you mean 30MB/s for USB 2.0? As for USB 3.0, even 300 MB/s sounds impossible, as this would be more than double the maximum sustained transfer rate of any current HDD.

As for the two USB mass storage devices, I'm wondering whether Verbatim does things differently to Seagate and WD. Perhaps the bridge IC inside Verbatim's enclosure enumerates the external drive as a multifunction device. If so, then you will never succeed in combining the two drives, at least not at the hardware level.

The fact that BIOS sees the external drive as two devices would suggest that this is indeed occurring at the hardware level rather than via a Windows driver. One way to confirm this beyond doubt would be to examine the output of Microsoft's UVCView:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/USB_IDs/UVCView.x86.exe

If you can get the above utility to run under your OS, then look for a single device with two "Mass Storage USB Device" Interface Descriptors.
 


Yeah, thanks for pointing that out! DBAN uses KB/s, my (1000 fold) mistake.

Just "sounding impossible" is nothing to my magic disk(s), see pics below.



This is what UVCView says (using USB2 port). Not sure what to read there.

27403140056-orig.jpg


Nuking pics:

Beginning
27402165463.jpg



USB2
27402284736.jpg



Starting up, USB3
27402265319.jpg



Impossible speed, USB3
27402275557.jpg



 
I was hoping someone would have an answer to your problem because I confess I don't have one.

FWIW, I see another discussion in this forum where a user of a 3TB WD external HDD is having problems reformatting his drive as FAT32. In his case the reason appears to be that his USB mass storage device is reporting 4KB LBAs. Yours, OTOH, appears to be reporting the traditional 512-byte LBAs. Furthermore, UVCView reports a wMaxPacketSize of 0x0200 (= 512) for your 3TB drive and 0x0400 (= 1024) for the WD user's 3TB drive. It appears that different manufacturers use different approaches.

I confess that I'm no expert when analysing UVCView's output. AISI, your report has a single USB mass storage device, yet your BIOS detects two USB drives. To see whether this is to be expected, I decided to do some experimenting of my own.

My Canon printer/scanner/copier has two slots for memory devices, namely CF and SD cards. UVCView detects a single USB device with 3 Interface Descriptors -- a printer, a device which I believe is the scanner, and a single USB mass storage device.

I also have a Transcend card reader with multiple slots. UVCView reports only one interface descriptor for a single USB mass storage device. In Device Manager I also see only the one USB mass storage device under USB Controllers. However, I see 3 removable devices (TS0MFLRD7) under Disk Drives, and 3 more under Storage Devices. I also see 3 drive letters in My Computer.

Therefore ISTM that your external drive may have an "intelligent" bridge IC that is emulating two separate drives. Otherwise I can't see any way for a 3TB NTFS drive, with 512-byte LBAs, to be usable with Windows XP, as is, straight out of the box.
 
This page on the Western Digital web site says the following:

USB attached storage solution providers have solved many of the issues associated with Large Drives within the USB Bridge firmware. Some present large capacity drives as single drive using larger sector sizes while others present the large capacity drive as more than one or more smaller drives to the host. Please consult the solution provider for their solution availability and implementation details.
Click to expand...
It sounds very much to me like the OP's drive is the latter, and if that's true then there's nothing he's going to be able to do about it because it's not a question of partitioning the disk itself, it's a question of how the USB bridge chipset handles requests for I/O to particular sector numbers.

In fact this whole thing is kind of messy. The strategy I'd prefer is the one where the USB bridge chipset remaps the drive into 4Kbyte sectors, since it lets you access the whole disk as a single volume. But if you use that approach, you won't be able to directly connect the bare drive via SATA later on because the sector mapping will be all screwed up.

Until the USB mass storage protocol is updated to allow for larger sector numbers it looks like USB-connected 3TB+ drives are always going to be a little screwy.
 
Nice find, sminlal! That explains a lot.

Maybe Olotila could show the article to Verbatim's tech support team and ask them for Verbatim's "implementation details". ;-|

BTW, some of the grammar on that page is awful.
 
I have suspected something like that.

I hope Verbatim comes clear about this so I can stop strugling with this.

The disk still shows 2 devices, both 3TB. I would be happy to get it back to original state, but have no way of knowing how to do it.

The first Verbatim support told me to nuke the disk, but nuking does not succesfully complete with DBAN or Seagete Diskwizard. Nor does full format. Tired of doing things that do not work :)

 
I wonder if removing the disk from the enclosure and connecting it to a SATA port on your system would help? That you let you see for sure that the sector size and partition layout is, and you could repartition the drive without the USB chipset getting in your way.

Of course removing the drive from the enclosure would almost certainly void the warranty...
 
I understand that. The problem is that he seems to have ended up with bad partition tables in each of the simulated drives, both of which claim to have 3TB of space. I'm thinking that by connecting the drive directly to a system he might be able do something about that. Perhaps if he simply zeroed all the sectors on the drive and then put it back into the enclosure he'd then be able to properly initialize it as 2TB and 1TB disks.
 


Yes, I've thought about that a few times. And no, I'm not ready to void the warranty yet. I'll wait for the Finnish Verbatim support to contact me before doing that.

What a mess. I hope manual would have warned against trying to combine the two magic disks.
 
Verbatim support told me that the chip inside the case didn't have anything to do with the issue and the firmware of the drive caused it to display two USB devices. I tried to argue that this is unlikely, but they didn't want to help me (they told me I was asking about production internals they could not reveal because they do not make the drives). So I opened the case and checked and found out that it is indeed, just as I thought, the controller inside the case that "splits" the hard drive into two devices. When the drive is hooked up over SATA, it is possible to access the 2 TB part of it because it is the beginning of the hard drive. The second part (800 GB) is not accessible though, because it is not a partition, but a "second drive". What this means is that after the 2 TB mark, there is a new partition table that cannot be accessed because no software expects a second MBR/GPT to be there. It might still be possible to access the data on that part of the disk with special tools, maybe an imaging software that can turn the second part of the drive into an image of a separate drive and then that image could be accessed. But I haven't tried any of that.

After fiddling around quite a bit more, I fixed the original issue though. Jmicron provides firmware updates for the JMS539 chip inside the Verbatim case. I don't know if Verbatim just shipped an older version or a modified version, but after the update, the drive can be formatted as one large partition. The updates can be found here: http://www.station-drivers.com/page/jmicron.htm
It might be necessary to hook up the drive to a USB 2 port for the update to succeed. If you don't have Windows, use a friend's computer to perform the update (nothing needs to be installed) or use the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com/)

I hope that helps. By the way, my case contained a Hitachi drive if that makes any difference (it shouldn't because the chipset inside the case is modified, not the drive).
 


Wow, that did it! Now I have just one 3TB partition and it is functioning nicely. Firmware update did not even delete any data, the magicdisk1 just vanished.

Thank you!
 
Wow, that bit of information is a real treasure. Many thanks for posting it!
 
CAn you post a full tutorial on how you did this?

I already updated the firmware but im stuck from there on.
 
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