Weird Problem with my USB Hard Drive Dock

[Kasey Chang]

I have a 2-disk USB3 hard drive dock with 2 bays, and right now I have a 3TB and a 4TB spinning drives in there. The drives are working fine.

The problem is every few weeks, the computer stopped recognizing the drives in there. Kept saying the partitions are not formated, basically I lose all data I left on them. So I format the drive, repartition the thing, put some non-essential backups on there, and a few weeks later... drives are unrecognized again.

There seems to be no particular pattern to this. Quick removal was already set (i.e. no caching) and it's happening to both drives, one of which is much newer than the other (by a few years), so it's the dock. There's no firmware update, and it doesn't seem to be the USB port either. Though that, I am not certain.

I bought a single port dock, but I am not sure if that will solve the problem or not.

I guess I can always install the drives internally...

[gilraen]

See if USB Selective Suspend is enabled? Seems like a stretch but in theory it could be screwing with the power supply to the external drive, and Windows doesn't like that.