USB problems?

[Hondaman]

Recently I discovered my SSD died (OCZ/Toshiba 240 GB). It was in a USB enclosure, attached to the Linksys WRT-AC1200 router. Since then I removed the USB enclosure and attached it to my Win7 PC (AMD 8150 CPU, 970 chipset, 64 GB RAM). I also gathered one or two other USB enclosures to figure out what is going on.

(I suspect that I lost quite a few MP3 and FLAC files I recently ripped from my audio CDs, I think I lost very little un-replaceable stuff.)

I think it is IMPOSSIBLE for Win7 to have any problems with a USB enclosure as long as Win7 knows how to speak to the motherboard's USB controller chips. But one or more of my USB enclosures makes Win7 give a message that it is trying to obtain drivers, and it never succeeds. So obviously it IS possible for Win7 to have problems with the USB enclosure's chips, OUTSIDE the motherboard's USB chips.

(Clearly in the future, I will need to use Linux (perhaps an awk script invoking the "cp" copy command) to back up files to the USB enclosure, then after the initial backup, copy only those files that I updated [docs / spreadsheets mostly]. The command line is a valuable tool indeed.) (I've dual-booted since my Windows 3.1 / Caldera Linux days with my K5-166 MHz CPU, so I have long had that "safety net" of Linux.)

Any idea what's going on here? If I buy a modern USB enclosure, will I have even more problems? Will Linux also have a problem seeing the drive, in addition to Win7?

[eccerr0r]

I really don't think there's any issues with USB, as USB-storage is pretty standardized. Most of the issues likely being seen are due to bad connectivity or bad power causing possibly permanent damage to the storage medium. Yes there are some bad USB-ATA bridges out there but other than causing slowdowns and hiccups, shouldn't cause damage to the media except for power.

I really don't think Linux helps except for the fact that it doesn't care about any windows shenanigans that it tries to write to the disk.

If you see problems with a direct SATA connection I don't think Linux will have any better luck. However tools like ddrescue and photorec are OSS and you'll be OSS all the way down to the hardware when using them in Linux.

Anything worth keeping better have more than one copy, and the OS doesn't matter. I don't see why Linux is needed for doing backups, and you're not immune from data loss using Linux either... ask me.

[stj]

what type of ssd is it? maybe it uses usb and there is no chip in the enclosure

[Hondaman]

Interesting......I booted from a DVD of Mint 21.3. After about 8 minutes, the live environment came up. Mint 21.3 was able to read a 1.0 TB WD Black spinning drive (one big NTFS partiiton, backup of documents, spreadsheets, pictures) in 2 different USB enclosures. The 500 GB Samsung EVO 570 SSD is apparently BLANK, and this is why Windows and Linux could not read it (I thought it had Mint 21.3 on it). I'll probably have to use a rescue CD/DVD to format the SSD (no other hard drives present) before I can use the 500 GB SSD. So once again, the problem is my lack of understanding of what's going on.

Thanks !