I have 4x 4TB WD blue drives in the DS-4SSD, in Windows 11.
Diskpart shows 4 drives all of 4TB instead however, but I cannot seem to manipule the 4th disk
Disk Manager shows 3 disks as 4TB drives and then a 4th protected/read only drive of 16tb..
I am able to format 3 of the 4 drives and I think use them but I cannot do anything with the 4th fake drive
How do I change this so I see just the 4 4TB drives instead of any raid?
@patrick visniewski Make sure none of the drives are being eaten up by Storage Spaces.
how do I do that? I checked storage spaces in settings and I do not see any entries so I think nothing is being used by it.
What else can I check?
If I try to add some storage space it just lists a single sabrent drive rather than 3 or 4 drives.
How strange. I search for "disk" in settings and found "Manage Disks and Volumes"
This showed all 4 drives, but did not show any as formatted. And showed only 1 as available to have a partition created. So I went ahead and did that and then inspected the other drives. On each it listed them as having been setup with an MBR partition style rather than GPT which is the opposite of what I did with the diskmgmt.msc. I setup all 3 available drives using GPT rather than MBR.....
But after doing this all with "Disks & Volumes" it also all shows up the same way in diskmgmt.msc.
Except originally even in Disks & Volumes it was showing up differently I thought.
But I guess the lesson here is probably that if you are running Windows 11 for this, use the real windows 11 tools rather than the legacy tools.
Also if you track these as open or closed issues you can consider this closed.
But in case someone can find this useful, I
So now I have all 4 drives available it seems
@patrick visniewski Thank you for the update. As to my above point, sometimes drives will be assigned to Storage Spaces automatically by Windows, which can cause issues with Device Management recognition. Sometimes also DiskPart must be used to clean drives for them to show up properly. In your case it is different, but yes we recommend GPT. It is weird that it transpired that way.
First, I ask that everyone please wait to point and laugh at me until after I've left the room, as it will soon become apparent that I understand less about computers than anyone you've ever met.
There's a part of me that's thrilled to see that I'm not alone with having strange issues with the DS-4SSD... of course I'd much rather this was a place where people just popped in to say "it's been 5 years with no issues", but such is life.
Am I understanding this correctly, that the "disks and drives" section under settings isn't what should be used for setting the drives up?! I just assumed it was basically the same as Disk Management.
I have an issue (that happened once before) where all 4 drives show up, but they're not accessible (meaning they're showing under disks and drives without the assigned letters, and I'm almost positive they were all formatted and "initialized"...they're all 4TB drives, and each one is mostly full, so I'd really rather not go through all that again! (I think I backed up 3, but I have the worst luck with technology, and I'd be the one person delete everything because the cat stepped on my hand, or something just as ridiculous!)
How can these things go from showing up with a drive letter (for the last 3-4 months) then suddenly just showing as disk 00, 01, etc?
it's not overheating (I don't think), and after a restart, I saw it pop up in the left sidebar for 2 seconds, then vanished... HELP ME DEAR ABBY!
Ok, I realize this is only 20 minutes later, but I plugged it back in after maybe an hour for it to cool down, and 3 drives showed up... pretty good, but I'd really like all 4.
So I decided to switch the cable, which was usb-c from a different manufacturer, back to the one it came with. And so far so good, but I don't like it one bit... why does everything have to be made with the bare minimum put into it? The materials, build quality, etc. every company will use the cheapest they can get away with as long as it barely passes. I'm dirt poor, but if there was a company that built things to last, and stood behind it with a lifetime warranty like monster cables used to (maybe they still do, not sure) I wouldn't mind paying a premium price for certain things, I just want it to always work! (Sorry, old man rant done)
@Jack Bartolucci No problem, I understand your frustration. We're very aware of any and all user experiences. We do factor this in when updating our product lines. There's always the issue of balancing price as NAS hardware can get very expensive very fast. More knowledge of computers, especially Linux, can help in this area, and USB is about as simple as it gets, but there are still nuances to getting it work just right at times. We try to offer simple and accessible products while also having the more technical side covered for enthusiasts.
@Jack Bartolucci You can use Disk Management, yes. Storage Spaces is a little finicky at times and Windows doesn't always register all the drives as being usable for certain storage configurations. It's something we have seen in the lab. It's a result of this type of hardware and how it exposes the drives to the system.
@Sabrent I'm sorry I missed these messages, but good thing I found this again, because I'm having the same issue again and although it seems to randomly fix itself (and usually in a timely manner), this time I'm having something else that's really not ideal!
first, it's doing that thing where all drives are technically there, but no labels/drive letters (and I can't remember what I did last time where it was a quick fix besides changing the cable back to the one it shipped with) the added extra problem is that my steam pc games are on one of the SSDs, and when I check properties, it still said the drive is almost full, but going into the drive to check there's practically nothing there (like well under 1GB of data!) partially my own fault for playing musical chairs with the folders, and switching the install disk for God only knows what reason?! I guess I'm just a jinx that has too much free time.
@Sabrent hi there, if you're still around, I could really use some help with the DS-4SSD again...
I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but all drives were working fine for the last few weeks, then I had an issue with the antivirus and after a restart, they're gone again.
I'm wondering if they're not showing up because the antivirus is scanning them all first or something, I thought I had them set on the "skip it" list, but who knows if that's even the problem? Is there a list of troubleshooting techniques for this hub, bub?
I'm seriously losing my mind over here!
@Jack Bartolucci Try to bypass things on startup. Sometimes Safe Mode can work for this, or you can go down the startup list in Windows and also manually set things not to load. Maybe something is interfering. AV is one typical culprit, monitoring software is another.
