USB disk not recognised

[SaturnV]

Moving to a new post as requested..

I am having trouble connecting some USB drives to the Movie Server

A Samsung D3 3TB USB drive is not recognised at all by the DMS but works perfectly with my WIndows PC.

A Maxtor D3 5TB USB drive is is not recognised at all by the DMS but works perfectly with my WIndows PC.

A Samsung STORY 1.5TB USB drive is recognised.

Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB, 2TB and 3TB 3 1/2" drives in an Orico USB SATA caddy are all recognised by the DMS

I have an internal 8TB Seagate Ironwolf which works perfectly, but I had planned to double that to 16TB by adding a 5TB and 3TB USB drives. Clearly I was foolish to think plugging a USB external drive into a USB connector on the DMS might actually work..

All disks are formatted as NTFS with a GUID format

I've uploaded screen prints of the volume information for a 3TB Seagate drive in an Orico USB SATA caddy which is recognised and works perfectly in the Movie Server, and the same information for a 5TB Maxtor USB drive that is not recognised at all by the MS. As you can see, the partition / volume information is identical for both (other than the size). Both volumes have a single partition that Windows disk manager shows as "Healthy (Primary Partition)".

When I say "not recognised", I mean exactly that. Other than the fact that I can see from the disk activity light that the DMS is looking at the drive, after that - nothing at all. No "do you want to format?" message, just nothing at all.

As noted above, I also have a 3TB Samsung D3 USB drive that is not recognised by the DMS. All disks - those that work and those that don't are all actually 3 1/2" Seagate drives.

I did think this might be a GUID vs MBR issue, but of course the 3TB drive in the SATA caddy (that does work) also has to be a GUID partition because it's larger than 2TB.

All of the USB drives that are not recognised by the Movie Server work perfectly with Windows.

I even removed the 5TB from its USB case to try directly in the USB caddy and this still wasn't recognised by the DMS!

I'm baffled! Any ideas? At a guess I suspect this a device driver on the DMS that needs updating?

[october262]

did you try unplugging the DMS for a few minutes and
retry the USB disc ??

[SaturnV]

Yes thank you, one of the first things I tried several times but it made no difference.

I do have an update though.

Despite the fact that the MS does recognise NTFS GUID drives in a SATA caddy, I bit the bullet and trashed 5TB of data to change the format of my 5TB USB drive from NTFS to exFAT using my PC. The drive is now recognised by the MS, but curiously the MS no longer recognises drives in the USB SATA caddy that have been working perfectly for weeks... I shall perform further tests once I've re-populated 5TB of data onto the USB drive I had to format.

The thing that annoys me most is that it originally totally failed to recognise the USB drive. If there was a problem with the format or partitioning I would have expected the MS to pop up a "Do you want to format (or re-partition) this drive". I know the message exists - it pops up nearly every time I reboot the MS for the internal 8TB drive (yes even with no USB drives attached)!! I have narrowly escaped accidentally re-formatting this full 8TB drive many times (see earlier comments from me about "Why, after starting up, does the MS always ask if I want to format my internal 8TB drive???" (and has "OK" as the default)