Sabrent USB 3.0 docking station rant.

[Elixer]

Just got this new flat laying Sabrent USB 3 docking unit.

In testing, any HD that had MBR worked fine.
Any HD that had GPT did not (tried 2TB/3TB & 6TB).
Basically, any GPT formatted drive, Windows would NOT let you do anything with it.
It was the dreaded GPT protected partition, where all options are greyed out in Disk Management

I found this odd, so, after a bit of digging, it seems that this Jmicron controller was trying to access data via 512K sectors, instead of 4K sectors.

Luckily, there is a firmware update that correctly accesses GPT formatted drives with 4K sectors.
https://www.sabrent.com/downloads/?wpdmc=firmware-update

DS-UBLK/EC-DFLT – Firmware Update
This is firmware update for our Docking Stations to support hard drives that are over 4TB Please extract the contents of the compressed file and follow the instructions in the included PDF. Remove your Hard Drive from the Docking Station before you run this Firmware Update.

Even though it was brand new, received from Amazon (Amazon was seller), wasn't old stock, they actually still had a old firmware version on it. https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-External-Lay-Flat-Docking-EC-DFLT/dp/B00LS5NFQ2
As you can see on that page, they say this unit "supports up to 6TB", and obviously, it could never have.

Anyway, after the flash, all is well, it can read any drive I throw into it again.
Hope this helps someone in the future with these kind of issues.

 

[deustroop]

nice to know

 

[tcsenter]

Hey at least you got a firmware update. Some of them never do, so thumbs-up for Sabrent here.

 

[Ratman6161]

Its nearly universal for any product that's been on the market for a while to come out of the box with out dated firmware. It's no fun, I know. But things sit in the supply chain for a while and meanwhile they become out dated.

You are lucky you were able to update it. Imagine your brand new motherboard needs a bios update to use your brand new CPU and you need am working CPU in order to update test bios

 

[bbhaag]

^^^Yep. This happened to me when my son and I were building his first pc. I got a great deal on a MSI P67 board and thought I would be safe with a G530 cpu. Nope it shipped with an old BIOS and wouldn't boot. It still baffles me that P67 was built for Sandy Bridge and the G530 was a SB cpu but that's besides the point.
Anyway, glad to hear you got working even if you had to jump through a few hoops to get there.