JMicron

The problem:

An Orico OEM 3559SUSJ3 (Vidabox / JMicron / Orico) drive enclosure fails to recognize more than one drive. By recognize,  the individual drive light was not remaining illuminated after the enclosure was powered on and it’s POST complete.

If this is not your problem and you’re running a Windows machine, review this important list:

You should be able to recognize all the drives independently without issue, without any special drivers.
However, most buyers usually use Win XP, Vista, 7, 8, Server 2003, Server 2011.
Some ideas / please try the following items in sequence:

0. Just curious – has this been tried with a Win 7 / 8 / Server 2003 / 2011 system?
We would then at least be able to determine if it is a physical problem (if so, we can do a swap), or if it’s a driver / software issue.

1. Download and run this JMicron software package here:
http://www.filedropper.com/oem3559susj3
It should show the additional drives, and allow you additional controls for the unit via the JMicron app for things like RAID as well.
If the additional drives are shown, then we’re looking at some type of driver / software issue, not the hardware itself.

2. Can you double-check that the USB drivers are the latest versions?
We have had some users eliminate issues after upgrading from the non-default Windows drivers to a motherboard specific driver for the USB port.

3. Are you connecting to a USB 2 or USB 3 port?
Note that the device is designed for USB 3.

Orico may have additional resources/tips as well – direct link to their site:
http://www.orico.cc/

The hardware:

For the drives, I used a cheap 5TB Seagate, 3TB WD blue, and 3 1TB WD blue drives formatted in NTFS (Windows), HFS+(Mac OSX), ext3(Linux), ext4(Linux), and UFS(Unix) respectively. The host systems were a Windows 10 and Fedora 23 Linux with USB 2 and 3 ports and a CentOS 7.2 laptop with USB 2 and an eSATA port.All drivers and patches/updates are current.

All the drives were formatted with Gparted 0.19.1 with libparted 3.1.

Enclosures settings:

DIP switched were set for CLEAR mode and the SET button was pressed at power on until the enclosure gave it’s short beep of acknowledgement. CLEAR mode is also know as JBOD – Just a Bunch of Disks.

Drive arrangements:

The 5TB NTFS was in slot 1 and the 3TB HFS+ in slot 2, unit powered on – after a few seconds for POST, the top drive light (5TB) is illuminated. All hosts show only the 5TB mounted.
Power down the enclosure and swap the drives and power back on. Same as before, only the top drive light (3TB) is illuminated. All hosts show only the 3TB mounted.

Maybe there are too many TBs?
Power down the enclosure, and install the 3TB HFS+ and the three 1 TB *NIX drives. On power up, the enclosure shows all drive lights illuminated. The Windows machine wants to format all 4 alien disks while the Fedora machine happily mounts four drives. The CentOS machine with the eSATA port only mounts the top drive. OK, I have the cheap, non-portmultiplier eSATA chip, but CentOS mounts all four drives.

Power down the enclosure. Remove the 3TB HFS+ and install the 5TB NTFS drive. On power up, the enclosure shows only the top drive light (5TB) illuminated. The windows and *NIX machines only mount only the 5TB NTFS drive.

Power down the enclosure. Move the 5TB drive into the bottom bay. On power up, the enclosure shows only the slot 2 drive light (1TB ext3) illuminated. The windows wants to format the ext3 drive and *NIX machines only mount only the 3TB ext drive.

Power down the enclosure. Remove the 5TB drive. On power up, the enclosure shows only the all drive lights (slot 2,3,4) illuminated. The windows wants to format all the *NIX drives and *NIX machines mount all drives.

Maybe the format is bad?
Format the 5TB and an ext4 with GPT and a 1TB as NTFS.

Run through the tests again… It appears the enclosure DOES NOT LIKE TO MIX NTFS DRIVES WITH NON-NTFS DRIVES.

Summary:

USB2 or 3 makes NO difference, other than transfer speed. eSATA only works well with PC’s with Port Multiplier eSATA chips, PM eSATA is a rare beast.

NTFS drives only play well with other NTFS drives.