SSD Storage

monkey44 wrote:


And, yes, an internal SSD I installed in the proper enclosure.

New INTERNAL HDs whether spinning rust or SSD come from manufacturer unformated, no partion and for Windows OS not initialized.

Pre built external USB hard drives (enclosure with HD preinstalled by factory come already prepartionined, preinitialized and preformatted. You simply plug and go.

In your situation, you took a SSD which was meant for being installed internally in a PC and married it into a separate external USB drive case.

The drive case does not initialize the drive, does not partition the drive and does not format the drive.

YOU must do all of that before the external drive will be usable and visable to Windows.

To do the steps needed you need to open DISK MANAGEMENT, your external drive will show up in there as unformated. Select that unformated drive, you should get prompt to initialize the drive, OK the initialization (failure to initialize will result in being unable to partition and format the drive).

Once initialized you are now able to select the drive and choose format, there will be a couple of prompts to follow on screen, you DO NOT have to assign a drive letter, and in the case of removable media I highly recommend NOT assigning a drive letter and allow Windows to dynamically assign the drive letter..

NOTE: If your drive is over 2 TB in size and you want the entire drive to be one partition you will also need to choose GPT partition in order to make it all one single partition.

Drives smaller than 2TB, use default of MBR as there is no advantage of GPT and if drive is connected to an older PC with older OS GPT may not be recognized.

Be also aware, SSD drives REQUIRE considerably more amperage to operate over spinning rust, this can be an issue with your USB ports being unable to support the additional current draw of a SSD in an external enclosure which does not have it's own power supply.

USB 2 and 1.1 PC ports 5V current is limited to .5A (500 ma)

USB 3 PC (SuperSpeed)ports can support about .9A (900 ma)

However in order for your USB 3 port to supply .9A your USB enclosure and connecting cable MUST also be a USB 3 connection.

USB 3 PC ports look the same as USB1.1/2, but they will be BLUE color and that port has additional connections that are difficult to see but the are there.

Not having enough port current can cause external drives to not be recognized or be intermitant.