Okay, I have an Issue With My External HDDs

my machine thinks they're SSDs

Published on February 21, 2016 By starkers In Personal Computing

The title pretty much says what the problem is, and for the most part it isn't an issue.... until I want to use various 3rd party programs to defrag and/or clean up.

For example, the wipe free space in Ccleaner is unavailable, with the select boxes for each HDD greyed out and the drive description being SSD, which it isn't. The other program I can't use is SmartDefrag. Again, the select boxes for my HDDs are greyed out, and the drives are recognised as SSDs.

Thing is, I am unable to perform various maintenance tasks as required, and I do like to keep things in tip, top condition, so hopefully somebody here can help me resolve this dilemma. I've looked all through Device Manager/Disc Management and found nothing useful, and a web search turned up nothing helpful, so here's hoping there is an answer for this here.

The machine is a HP Envy x2 Detatchable PC 13 with Windows 8.1 x64 on a 128Gb SSD. There's 4 standard platter HDDs connected via a USB 3.0 Hub to a USB 3.0 port, yet various tools and etc identify them according to the OS drive.

TIA for any assistance offerred.

Comments (Page 3)

starkers

on Mar 05, 2016

Okay, so I reset this little beastie to factory settings and all is well again in the computing world of starkers. My maintenance proggies are doing those previously unavailable tasks and everything else is just that bit snappier.

Anyway, thanks again to all who offered ideas to resolve the issue, I appreciate it.

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