Thursday, October 15, 2020

Beware of 2TB Clover CM201hi external USB3 hard disk devices. Something not quite right...

 A good friend recently bought a new external USB3 2TB hard disk that was behaving strangely from the first time it was plugged in. It was initially plugged into a USB3 port on a Windows 10 machine.   When plugged in the LED on the case flashes to show the device is active. After a significant wait time, sometimes the PC 'sees' the drive and identifies it as a Clover CM201hi external USB device but reports the size as Zero. Sometimes the PC sees it as a USB storage device with size listed as 1.8TB but Most of the time it reports the device as USB storage with no other information. 

We have tried using various hard drive repair/recovery software and forensic analysis software/hardware to interrogate the device. 

We managed to get the drive to start up a few times (with start up delays of between 20 minutes and 2 hours) On performing a device block scan we got reports the drive had read/write errors on almost every block. After between 5 and 11 hours of block scanning (between 80% and 98% of all scanned blocks reporting errors) the drive then fails completely and appears to be 'unplugged'. 

It has some very strange information listed on the label. Quoted information below copied exactly as shown on label.

"During format preocess our hard disk will choose exFAT automatically as default efficient format. Please DO NOT select NTFS maually, this format is not supported by our hard disk, will cause disk crash." 

"QC Passed. Hard Disk Formatted already before packing & shipping. there is no need to reformat when first use."

"Special attention to our products (partitions are not supported), partitioning will cause damage to the hard disk. For safer and longer service life, use it directly as one independent partition"

There is also a second smal label that says "YP005 2TB" on the packaging.

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If You are looking for a new USB3 hard drive it would be best to get a known brand that has good user reviews, proper specifications listed by the manufacturer and does not have the strange limitations quoted above from the device label.

After much hunting online I did find some information from a few people who have managed to get these drives to work. They all reported that the performance is very poor, significantly slower than most USB2 storage devices. These drives are also very unreliable, suffering with read/write errors and loss of data after a only a few weeks of use.

Buyer Beware : 

Always research the item You are looking at and check user reviews before parting with Your funds. 

If in doubt, Don't ! There are plenty of good branded devices out there to choose from. They may be a little more expensive but when it comes to data storage an unbranded, unknown device that saves money will often have a short working life and lose Your precious data, if it works at all.  

73 de 'Hairy' Paul.