This DS-U3B4 4 bay docking station is supposed to allow "Hot-Swap" of drives...
...but when I try ALL the drives disappear from windows explorer! The remaining drives usually reappear after a few seconds, but my file operations end with an error. There is no way to unmount a single drive - not from the system tray or the drive in file explorer - so anytime I want to remove a drive I have to wait for ALL my operations to complete? Is that how this is supposed to work? If so, it is unacceptable.
Please tell me if i'm missing something.
Gerry
Hello GerryM,
Yes, this is the inherent hardware design of this docking station (and most multi-bay USB docks), rather than a defect with your specific unit.
The DS-U3B4 utilizes a single USB to SATA bridge controller chip to manage all four bays over one USB cable.
When you insert, remove, or power down a drive, that controller chip must briefly reset and re-enumerate the entire SATA topology to see what changed. Because all four bays share this single chip, Windows sees the entire dock disconnect for a brief second before it reconnects. In this tier of consumer hardware, "Hot-Swap" means you don't have to restart your computer to change drives, but the bays themselves are not electronically isolated from one another.
Because physical drive removal triggers a full controller reset, you must wait for active file operations across all bays to complete before pulling a drive, otherwise ongoing transfers will error out. If your workflow absolutely requires completely isolated hot swapping, where pulling one drive never touches the interface of the others, you would need an enterprise grade SAS/SATA backplane or a specialized multi-controller enclosure rather than a single chip USB dock.
If you have additional questions, I'll be happy to help!
