Drive letter not being assigned to new external SSD drive

Hi @AnnieB

Now that you brought in NAS, and mapped drives I had a relook at the Windows Disk Management screenshots you have put out in this thread.

My observations and understanding as follows:

1. Apart from your 1 TB System disk, Disk 1 (C:). you have an internal 1TB secondary disk, Disk 0, (D:) and a CDROM drive which in the natural course should have gotten the drive letter E: but shows up as drive F: (screenshot in your post #15). It is also missing in Windows Disk Management Screenshot in your post # 10.

2. Your WD Elements 6TB.Disk 2 (Y:), WD Elements 4TB,Disk 3 (K:) and Lacie 1TB, Disk 5 (N:) are external drives and AnnieMyCloud (L:) and AnnieShared Media (M:) are the mapped drives.

3, You also have a card Reader with four slots taking up drive letters (G:) to (J:)

In my opinion, you have meddled enough with the drive lettering to confuse the system to go off track and it requires a complete overhaul.

Do a drive cleanup as envisaged in my post #7 option 2 in this thread Must Assign Drive Letter Each Time I Swap Drives - Windows 10 Help Forums
Before you run DriveCleanup make sure you disconnect from the internet/network, safely remove all the external storage devices including the card readers, USB connected printers - in-short anything plugged into the USB ports ( except the mouse and Keyboard)

How to:

Download V1.6.5 of the drivecleanup.zip from Drive Tools for Windows (Roll down on this page till you see DriveCleanup
V1.6.5)

Unzip it to a folder, say drivecleanup.

You will have two folders Win32 and x64 each containing DriveCleanup.exe for 32 bit and 64 bit respectively.

Remove all USB storage devices from your system (except your Keyboard and mouse) and reboot. Disconnect internet/network.

Right click on the DriveCleanup.exe and run as administrator. (Use the DriveCleanup.exe file appropriate for your bit version of Windows.).

After the clean up act, reboot, and connect to internet/network

( When you plug in your USB devices after this cleanup, these will be installed afresh. What you have done is to remove all non-present devices, their registry entries with drive letters associated with them and start with a clean slate. )

When done assign the drive letter Z: to your CDROM drive and X: and Y: to your two mapped drives. Henceforth those will receive the same drive letters.If you want the external disks also get the same drive letter assign drive letters .......U: V: W: in the decending order. In other words you will go back in the descending order of the alphabet list starting with Z and going down in lettering your drives for all the drives you want to retain the same drive letter.

Note: I have a Seagate 1.5 TB and a Seagate 5TB HDDs on a two slot ORICO dock used for backups and an External BD ROM drive and all these drives get the same drive letter W, X, Y, Z when switched on/plugged in.



I have some exFAT drives also but do not experience any lag. I think it depends on the speed of the processor. If after the lettering problem gets resolved, you still have the lag in the exFAT disk, you may consider formatting it to NTFS.

Thanks for the replies. Here's an update.

For the last couple of days things seem to have started to work properly. I have no idea why. After I last posted I switched the PC off and went to bed. I don't have Fast Start-up on. The next day, I plugged the drive in and ejected it a couple of times and it worked. Then I restarted (not a shutdown) the PC. This is when I got the issue again. However, I restarted a couple of more times and tested and it worked properly. Today, after another shutdown, I have tested it again and also after a restart and all is well.

Something I did notice when ejecting is the Safely Remove Hardware says it is a 'USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device' which is a bit different to my other drives. I don't know whether this makes a difference.

I have had no response from WD and have not put any data on the drive yet and will continue to test this over the weekend.

AnnieB said:

Something I did notice when ejecting is the Safely Remove Hardware says it is a 'USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device' which is a bit different to my other drives. I don't know whether this makes a difference.

I have had no response from WD and have not put any data on the drive yet and will continue to test this over the weekend.

Click to expand...

I have a Crucial 1TB BX500 SSD (SATA) placed in a Cablet enclosure and in Device Manager under Disk Drives it shows as "Cablet USB 3.0 SCSI Disk Device" and under Storage controllers it shows as "USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device"


So what shows up in your case may be correct in a way or Is it because of the delinquent drive lettering problem? To know, plug that drive into your husband's PC and check what it shows as, in the Safely Remove icon in the system tray. Let us know. (For my Cablet enclosed Crucial SSD, I had labelled it as CRBX500 1TB and shows up as Eject Cablet - CRBX500 1TB (I:))

Is there any specific reason why you chose the WD My Passport SSD?


What all the Discovery for Windows offers?

WD Discovery Software User Guide, Download, and Instructions

This Discovery software will also install WD Security and WD Drive Utilities. For backup one has to download Acronis True Image , not cosidered as a good software by many in these forums.

Even to register your SSD to "Get Support, Warranty and Updates" you have to install this Discovery software . Now you know why you did not get any response from the Technical Support .

Among the WD HDDs only the Elements Model does not have Hardware encryption. My Book and My Passport are hardware encrypted, like it or not. And if the Electronics (hardware encryptor/decryptor chip) inside the enclosure fails , there is no way to recover the data without surrendering to the Western Digital Data recovery partners who only have the Keys to decrypt the recovered data.

I do not know about the WD SSDs since I do not buy anything WD.

As for external SSDs it is always preferable to buy appropriate standard enclosures and plug in the SSDs of your choice. No enforced pesky software.

@jumanji

The SSD drive is the same on my husband's PC. I think it is probably correctly showing as a USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device.

I didn't load the WD Discovery software when I purchased this drive as I put it on when I bought the WD Elements drive which I returned. I uninstalled it after I took it back because I didn't like it. I was surprised it was there to be honest as I had understood that nothing came with the Elements drives. I use EaseUs ToDo Backup software because it's fairly easy to understand.

Anyway, I registered the SSD drive on the WD website and I see it in the support area of my account. The question I have with them is still open but the drive seems to be behaving as it should now in any case.

OK. You said over the week-end you will be monitoring whether the drive letter sticks. As an Engineer-Scientist I would never never accept that "Somehow it became alright " theory . Intermittent problems (as I suspect in this case) require a long time monitoring.. If at anytime the drive letter is lost again, do a drivecleanup and assign drive letters in an orderly fashion keeping the drive letters you wouldn't like to change at the end of the alphabetical list. Good luck.

I am just curious to know where you bought that SSD. I checked amazon.uk and found that it is a US import...

@jumanji
I bought the SSD drive in Currys.
I am using the drive as a backup. Fortunately all of the data on there will be duplicated in about 4 other places so whilst I agree that it's annoying not to have got to the bottom of the issue, loss of the data wouldn't be critical.