Question: I recently bought a WD Green 3TB hard drive for backup purposes. I have it in a Thermaltake BlacX USB 3.0 cradle outside of the PC. I have tried a hundred different things I found online, from different partitioning hardware to updating drivers and BIOS, but I can’t get the PC to recognize any more than 746GB. From what I saw online, lots of others are having the same problem. I run a Phenom II X6 1090T in an MSI 890FXA-GD65 motherboard with BIOS version 18.9, an AMD 7970, and 16GB of RAM. Any ideas would be appreciated. —Gayle Curry
The Doctor Responds: It looks like the problem is with that Thermaltake BlacX cradle not correctly supporting Advanced Format drives like the WD Green series with 4KB sectors instead of 512B sectors. Depending on the model, Thermaltake lists its BlacX docks as supporting “up to 2TB” or “up to 4TB” drives, but it depends on the USB controller inside the cradle, and its firmware. It’s also possible that you can update the firmware for the USB controller on your cradle, but Thermaltake’s website is a little wonky—we couldn’t find firmware update tools for the BlacX 5G, for example. WD’s support page indicates that you may be able to get it to work if you attach the drive directly to your motherboard’s SATA ports and format it as a GPT partition in Windows Disk Management, then remove it and put it in the USB dock.
