Weird USB Enclosure behaviour

[Siddhartha Jain]

Hi,

I bought a Samsung CDRW Drive (SH-522) and a Adcom 5.25" USB HDD
enclosure. Put the CDRW drive in the enclosure and plugged it to the
USB 2.0 port of my laptop. Windows 2000 and Linux on my laptop, both,
detect the drive as a USB Mass Storage device but are unable to read
from it. Windows doesn't assign it a drive letter but in the hotplug
list I can see a "USB Mass storage disk" device. The Linux logs show a
USB Mass storage device getting detected but shows buffer I/O errors
and several resets to the device. At this point, I assumed that either
one of them was faulty, the CDRW DRive or the enclosure.

Next, I plug a 20GB HDD in the 5.25" enclosure and it worked fine!!
Thats one. Two, I plugged in an older CDROM drive in the enclosure and
that worked fine too!! Ok, I thought maybe the CDRW is bad.

Now, I plugged in the CDRW in a PC on the IDE bus and guess what? It
works!! Test two - I took out the connector board from a 3.5" USB
enclosure and plugged the CDRW drive to it and it worked!!!

To conclude, the 5.25" USB enclosure works with a seagate HDD and a
CDROM drive. The Samsung CDRW drive works directly on the IDE bus in a
PC and works with another 3.5" USB HDD Enclosure. But the 5.25" and
Samsung CDRW don't work together.

All this left me scratching my head. Can you make anything out of it?

Thanks,

- Siddhartha

 

[Arno Wagner]

Hi,

I bought a Samsung CDRW Drive (SH-522) and a Adcom 5.25" USB HDD
enclosure. Put the CDRW drive in the enclosure and plugged it to the
USB 2.0 port of my laptop. Windows 2000 and Linux on my laptop, both,
detect the drive as a USB Mass Storage device but are unable to read
from it. Windows doesn't assign it a drive letter but in the hotplug
list I can see a "USB Mass storage disk" device. The Linux logs show a
USB Mass storage device getting detected but shows buffer I/O errors
and several resets to the device. At this point, I assumed that either
one of them was faulty, the CDRW DRive or the enclosure.

Next, I plug a 20GB HDD in the 5.25" enclosure and it worked fine!!
Thats one. Two, I plugged in an older CDROM drive in the enclosure and
that worked fine too!! Ok, I thought maybe the CDRW is bad.

Now, I plugged in the CDRW in a PC on the IDE bus and guess what? It
works!! Test two - I took out the connector board from a 3.5" USB
enclosure and plugged the CDRW drive to it and it worked!!!

To conclude, the 5.25" USB enclosure works with a seagate HDD and a
CDROM drive. The Samsung CDRW drive works directly on the IDE bus in a
PC and works with another 3.5" USB HDD Enclosure. But the 5.25" and
Samsung CDRW don't work together.

All this left me scratching my head. Can you make anything out of it?

USB to IDE converters are notoriously incompatible in the strangest
ways. I have now tried 6 different ones and not a single one
worked correct for the different HDDs I tried with. Exception:
I tried my Agrosy enclosure only with Seagate and Maxtor 3.5"
disks. Don't know whether it has problems with Samsung or
notebook HDDs.

Arno