I'm encountering a perplexing issue with my WD My Duo enclosure that has two 10TB WD RED drives installed. While it works perfectly fine on my Mac—allowing me to see the drives, format them through Disk Utility or the WD Drive Utilities app—I'm having a tough time getting it to work on my Windows machine. When I connect the enclosure to Windows, it shows up in diskpart as a drive, but the capacity reads 0 bytes. I'm unable to format or mount it, and I keep running into an 'incorrect function' error when trying to initialize it via Disk Management. I've checked that the cables work fine both on my Mac and Windows, but I'm stumped as to why this is happening. I've tried using a SATA dock with the drives individually, and they work great. I don't have access to another Windows machine, so I'm not sure if the issue lies with my MiniPC or the enclosure itself. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
It sounds like the issue could be related to a compatibility problem between the USB controller on your MiniPC and the bridge chip in your WD enclosure. It's great that everything works on your Mac, which suggests the drives are fine. Here are some things you can try: check Device Manager for any yellow warning icons when the enclosure is connected. If you see any, try uninstalling the device and let Windows reinstall it. Also, try switching between USB-A and USB-C ports if your MiniPC has both, as they can sometimes operate on different controllers. Lastly, make sure to disable any USB power management settings in Device Manager to see if that helps. If none of that works, you might be facing a compatibility issue that’s pretty common with budget MiniPCs. In that case, using separate enclosures for your drives could be a good alternative.
Looks like a classic case of USB issues! Good luck, I hope it works out for you.
This is a really informative response! Makes a lot of sense considering my own experiences. Thanks for the tips!