I’ve just had a 2nd USB3 SATA enclosure go bad. I can’t remember what the first one was. This one is an Orico MS400U3. It was plugged into a Linux box with one drive and the drive started reporting strange errors so I removed the drive and connected it direct to SATA and it’s working fine - after fsck fixed the errors on it. I thought maybe the USB port on the Linux box might be bad so I plugged the Orico into a Windows PC with a known good 1TB drive in it (a different drive than originally gave errors) - Windows sees the drive as 115PB and won’t let me format it.
Is there any explanation for this other than the controller board in the enclosure somehow failing?
I’m thinking of going for this StarTech one next. Any other suggestions?
doesn’t have to be just the controller in the enclosure, there’s a multitude of connectors i.e. points of failure between the CPU and the HDD, they all have to be 100% perfect in order for your drive to function correctly. any one of them is a tiny bit off - your data is corrupted, the error-correction in consumer drive models notwithstanding.
although the models you mentioned aren’t the cheapest, I wouldn’t put any significant amount of trust in them; there’s a reason enterprise-level devices cost a multitude of those.