If you buy a run-of-the-mill external drive, that will almost certainly be the case, but Samsung have enough dosh and expertise to commission custom circuit boards. They will probably make the boards themselves and buy in the bare drives.

Edited by micksharpe (Mon 23-Mar-15 20:25:07)

In that case I'll defer to both you and Batboy's superior knowledge on this particular subject. My suggestion to remove the drive from the case and plug it in to a Sata port would be a no goer then.

Well, the socket on the PCB looks like an eSATA connector but there's clearly no additional circuitry on the case -- the connector just pokes through. Since the case has a label with USB 3.0 on it, I can only conclude that the PCB has a USB interface. I can't imagine that they would provide some sort of smart cable with it to convert SATA to USB. It doesn't make sense and it would hardly be a USB drive. Large manufacturers can and do fit custom circuit boards to bare drives.

How old is this M3 drive as I believe they have a Samsung 3 year warranty?

The stupid thing here is that I'm the one who posted the Youtube link on how to disassemble a M3 caddy which if Id bothered to watch the whole thing shows exactly how the hard disk PCB is made. Doh! The socket is a USB 3.0 micro-B btw.

Thanks to all for your advice. After spending a lot of time trying various software options, Including Mick's suggestion I ripped open the case. No SATA connections so a caddy was a non starter.

It's so annoying that device manager can see it but windows explorer can't. So, in the end I slammed it down on it's side on a desk. I didn't really but felt like doing it. I've written it off, so will look for a replacement.

Why not buy a SATA drive and an external enclosure that provides both USB and eSATA interfaces? That way, you will know that if the drive fails (or you want a higher capacity), you can easily replace it. Be aware that a lot of dual interface enclosures only support USB 2.0. I'm still looking for a moderately-priced USB 3.0 / eSATA enclosure.

Edit: It may also be cheaper than buying an integrated unit.

Edited by micksharpe (Wed 25-Mar-15 11:19:18)