Question Are all USB to sata cables so fussy?

[mikeford]

First off I know what I am doing is a bit stressful, running drive diagnostics, but all of the adapters I've tried so far have seemed kinda flakey. I think I started with a Startech from Amazon, and it kept disconnecting, so returned it. Newegg did a special on Rosewill, and I bought two and while they work for the most part, from time to time they get stuck or otherwise seem to be part of the problem. As said I am running diagnostics on 4TB and 6TB drives, so touchy operations and large and or long processes.

Good side, USB 3.0 seems to have the same speed as internal sata drives, and they basically work allowing more drives than internal sata connections without messing around and disconnecting the DVD etc.

Bad side, sometimes they stop working, often related to errors on the drive or the drive not responding. The 12v a 3.5" drive requires via external AC adapter is always on when plugged in, so drive spins up or down when you plug/unplug the power adapter from the sata adapter. The order this should be done, power to adapter, and adapter to drive was stated one way in part of directions and opposite in another. I've settled on plugging in, adapter to drive, power to adapter, USB to PC.

 

[damian101]

All the USB 3.0 to SATA adapters I've owned worked reliably and without problems. USB 3 Type-A connectors are generally problematic though, they can often be easily tilted until they disconnect.
For 3.5" SATA drives connected to USB I normally just pull the power cable when there is no switch.

 

[razel]

Agree with damian101. Nearly all of the ones I own work very well. The problematic ones I encountered were back in the end of USB 2.0 to early 3.0 days. No surprise really. 1st gen chipsets are bleeding edge. You see that now with these early USB-NVME adapters. Your hope is firmware update support.

Just don't buy any cheap non-name brand imports. Stick to the trusted ones or even better import brands. The last few USB-C to SATA enclosures I bought all support UASP and TRIM. If you just bought a USB-SATA adapter that doesn't support that, return it. You can find UASP support via the Device Manager, it'll say UASP and TRIM support can be easily checked by connecting an SSD and running 'optimize and defrag drives' in Windows and it'll detect it as an SSD.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

USB 3.x can also be touchy with cable quality, particularly for longer cables. I've had random disconnects happen because of this. It gets really bad for 10Gbit, you generally shouldn't expect more then 1m cables to work reliably with it, unless they're seriously high quality.

There is no guarantee the manufacturer provided one is any good either.

Another thing is that any 2.4GHz wifi or bluetooth emitters nearby can cause interference in USB3.

 

[mikeford]

At this point I think I am happy with the Rosewill, RU301 I think, $8 right now at newegg.

My only USB C device or port right now is a new jump pack for the car, so its at the pita stage, but eventually C sounds wonderful.