Transcend External Hard Drive Not Working
Faustina Trafton
My question pertains to using an external hard disk in the MAC book Pro. I have a transcend external hard drive that works on the mac book pro - without my having formatted it etc. It also works on a windows system. ( I have as yet only used it to access documents that were previosly stored in the external hard disk)
Typically new hard drives, or ones that have been used with Windows, are formatted to NTFS. Macs can read but not write to NTFS. Are you sure the drive is fully functional with your Mac? If you format a drive to Mac format you will find it does not work with windows unless you buy third party software to enable it. Likewise, you have to use third party software to get NTFS to fully work on Macs. The only format that really works with both without additional support is FAT, but there are many limitations to using this pretty old formatting system. There's no ideal solution for dual use and it would help to have more details as to what you intend to do with this drive. I use a Flash drive for dual use but I leave it as FAT since I don't need to copy on huge files.
Have you tried downloading to the disk? A PC HDD will let you look at the contents but not write to it. If you cannot write to it, you will have to reformat it via Disk Utility. In order to use on both PC and Mac use MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFAT and for Mac only, Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I have a 500GB Transcend StoreJet external HDD. The problem is it beeps for long time. When it beeps I can not access the drive. Even sometime I can, I dont see full file listing or empty folder!It just beeps and beeps. Never stops. Sometimes removing the USB cable and attaching it again makes the sound goes away. But it does not work all time.
Another option is to use a USB hub which have external power supply. I have such hub. I have been using this hard drive on that hub for about 3 years. Recently I just turned off my hub and put the HDD in front panel. So the problem arose. Now its okay as I connect it again.
my armored 500gb Transcend requires a double USB cord- that means it's got a male mini USB on one end and TWO standard male USBs on the other end. if you connect it to your computer with a standard 'one mini USB to one standard USB' cord like you use for dozens of other devices, you are only feeding it half the power it needs and it will just beep at you. if you can't find the cord I don't know if a powered USB hub will help unless it automatically feeds it the required voltage- which it may...I've never worked with them. hope you got this fixed, I'm just posting this for other beeping Transcend external drive users.
I recently had a proble like that, it was a Seagate 1tb 3, 5 fitted on external usb case, I took the disk out, shaked it strongly ( be careful not to drop it) and heard a click, then plugged it in and worked ok.
Mine had the same problem, it was one of those military-grade shock-proof HDDs.Threw it around the room, reconnected it after every throw, and it's started working again.Only did it because it didn't have any important files though :p
I have Transcend 500GB external hard disk. I recently switched from Windows7 to Ubuntu. Before everything was working fine, but now as I have my project files on external hard disk, I used MountManager to mount my hdd on ubuntu. But now my hdd is only detected on ubuntu on my laptop(not sure if will be detected on other laptop/computer with ubuntu).
When I try to use it with Windows, nothing happens at all, not detected, not even in Disk Management of Windows, not a single sign of my hdd. But when i tried Windows7 setup disk, I found my hdd in advanced tools.
Oh,I found the problem. in your summary it says it is partitioned as HPFS/NTFS. Did you partition it in Ubuntu? I had the same error. It isn't detected by Windows since I partitioned it using Ubuntu. Backup all your data. And then format it as NTFS in Windows. This should solve the problem.
The problem first occurred on a 7th gen i7 system with Windows 10 21H1. I ran virus scans, HDD scans, changed the preference settings of the drives in device manager and so on without any difference, errors or otherwise on each drive. I then purchased a brand new 10th gen i7 system, installed Windows 10 21H1 on it and the problem replicated there.
So, I contacted Western Digital regarding their drives and they were not interested in helping me. Since then, the drives have been sitting in a box as they were past the return window and because they were externals, the warranty of the supplier had expired and they also showed no interest.
Writing can slow down as the drive get full. Best not to let them get over 80% and defragging could be tried. I doubt that the hard drives are actually faulty as you are getting too many with the same fault.
If it were me I would boot up a Linux Distro on a USB stick and see how the hard drives perform with that. If they perform well then you can look at your Windows OS settings and if they perform the same then it is either the hard drive or your hardware.
Did you already read the recommendations of our field guides, especially those on getting started and on pos(t)ing good questions, including the helpful references found at the bottom of its web page?
The last referenced field guide reminds you to provide more details. No, I did not encounter such an expected symptom as I knew when to expect and how to avoid it. It seems that you should amend your sourcing policy if you want to avoid such expected symptoms. And a more precise description would also help to assist better. But the afore mentioned field guide had already reminded you this relation.
E.g. a list of models with your issued might be helpful. WD produced 4 TB 2.5" external HDDs and external SSDs. And among those external HDDs, there were models with SMR and models with CMR type of recording. Your symptom is typical for those with SMR type recording. This is known and caused some public outrage as WD did not publish its recording type per model several years ago. After that outrage, WD improved its communication policy and may include the recording type in its data sheets and other locations of their promotions.
The solution to such expected symptom is to include intended usage / purpose into your sourcing policy. For use cases where continuous transfer rate matter, you should avoid such SMR type external hard disks and should also select the product family according to such use case. WD has several product families for different use cases. It is helpful to take this into account in the sourcing process instead of accepting any product family of a brand if capacity, interface and form factor only match.
Seagate also offers CMR and SMR type models. And SMR does not imply to have such symptoms on every write operation. But the more data you transfer, especially large files, the more likely you may expect such symptoms.
I heard similar and other things of USB flash sticks, not yet of USB HDDs. In case of USB flash sticks, these were not original ones but USB sticks of pirates abusing and attaching brand labels to their wrongly specified and manipulated sticks.
According to my experience, most of the problems with USB-HDD adapters/enclosures are related to trivial power issues or the USB-SATA controller being a cheap piece of crap that gets overheated/overflowed during intense data transfers. Portable USB disks are suitable for domestic end-customer-grade usage to save some documents or media but may get extremely unstable and problematic under intensive workload due to the reasons above. That is one of the main reasons I prefer not to use them as backups, for example, -v.io/keep-backups-lets-talk-backup-storage-media/ . Since you are dealing with many USB HDDs and docking stations, I would probably recommend getting a multi-bay NAS for external storage purposes.
There is also an error about the page file which I turned off during the initial set up of the system. There are errors about delayed write failures and an error about a RAID array which I do not have.
This may be some corruption, left over of a previous operation and not properly reset. It should be reset after properly removing the previous device (including a successful eject operation completion before removal of the external HDD).
Every drive that I use, be it internal or external, 1TB or 14TB, are set up as GPT disks and formatted as NTFS with default allocation. Bitlocker is then enabled and once it is completed, I start using the drives. Please note that none of the drives have had their policies changed from default.
Try using those dual-power cords and see if that changes anything. Mechanical spindle drives may consume more power when used intensively, and a single USB port (especially on laptops) may not provide enough causing the issues mentioned above. That approach worked for me several times back in the days, so definitely worth a try.
The drives that were affected by the signal interference were in their original enclosures which consists of a silicon outer shell, hard plastic housing and a silicon band that goes around the sides of the drive.
According to CrystalDiskInfo, the drive has a total of 96 power on hours. I would have expected it to be more but I cant remember where the drive originated from. (Might have been one of those from a laptop that was swopped out for a SSD and then put away and forgotten about.)
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