Two dueling hard drives?

I have two 1.5TB WD “My Book Essential” hard drives. My computer seems to think they are the same drive and won’t read them at the same time. I get no errors when they are both plugged in, the second one just won’t read.


They are both present in device manager but not in Disk Management...

I have tried assigning unique (unused) drive letters, but the computer still thinks it is the same drive (I.e. I plug one in, assign it “X” and then unplug it. I plug the second one in, it shows up as “X” so I assign it “Q.” I unplug it, plug the first one in again and it shows up as “Q”.)

Does any of that make sense? Am I going insane? Am I missing something really simple?

Can anyone help?

Thank you!!!
 
Google for
my book essential hard drive not working
others seem to have issues too
 
Thanks jobeard. :) The thing is, they are both working perfectly - just not at the same time. I tried googling a bunch of different things before posting here, but could not seem to find any troubleshooting that touched on this. I have a 1 TB my book essential that I can use at the same time as either of the 1.5 TB my book essential hard drives, but cannot use both 1.5TB at the same time.
 
Yea, saw that. my thought is they just might have the exact same hardware-id or serial number.

try to get the latest firmware and or driver for them, perhaps using the devicemgr->device->driver->update
for each one at a time
 
Try naming each of them with a unique name, like External Movie Storage or EX HDD 2, by right clicking the drive, selecting properties, and typing in a new name. Changing drive letters didn't work because Windows assigns external drives the next available letter, and all you did was make the last one unavailable. I hope this works, I've never seen this problem before. My problem with drives is that Windows 8 sees 2 of my internal drives as external USB drives, a Hitachi 1TB which used to be external until I removed it from the ext. case, and a 2TB Toshiba that was bought recently as a bare drive. Any thoughts?
 
Win/7 has a nice resource monitor to show I/O activity
run CMD and enter TASKMGR->Performance Tab->Click Resource Monitor button near the bottom.
(you will need Admin privs).

The overview tab will show CPU, Disk, Network, Memory summaries and clicking the DISK TAB you can get the disk details. Three choices there are Processes with Activity, Disk Activity and Storage (aka the DLA assignments with the Disk Queue Length).

That gives you tools to monitor some tests, like COPY C:\foo D:\foo

If foo is a large file, you should be able to see the I/o activity on both.
Recommend you ensure Services->Volume Shadow Copy be set autostart and made active before you begin.
 
I'd suggest the following.
> Check for any firmware updates as mentioned in post above
> Next, see How to Cleanup and Remove old USB Storage Drivers to remove all the current USB storage drivers so we can get a fresh start

Then plug 'em in and see if same problem. If yes, then repeat the DriveCleanup tool again. We want to start testing with all the USB storage drivers remove again.

Am I correct to understand the first one works just fine when plugged and running alone?
> Plug one drive in. See [FONT=Arial]How To Report Your Computer's Device Manager Data[/FONT] and save a copy of the DevManView report. (Be sure you first change the SAVE AS pulldown to Tab Delimited Text before saving the report)
> Now plug the second drive in. Generate a 2nd copy of the DevManView report.

Attach both reports to your next post
 
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