I have a hard drive from Western Digital (model: WD2500BEVS-75UST0) that is running without visible problems inside my laptop connected with SATA. However, once I connect it with an external case that converts SATA to USB, I have troubles. The external case that I am using is: BIGtec 2.5" USB3.0 Portable SATA Hard Disk Enclosure (BIG152).
First of all, I formatted the disk when I use a direct SATA connection to my laptop (tried NTFS and FAT32 file system). Then, when I plug the hard drive to my Linux Mint laptop using USB (with the BIGtec Enclosure), it does not become automatically mounted but shows up in the disks utility. However, the filesystem is not recognized there and the format option is visible, but does not work. To investigate the situation further, I was running fdisk /dev/sdb in terminal (sdb is the hard drive connected via USB) and get the following message:
fdisk: unable to read /dev/sdb: Input/output error
Does anybody have an idea what I could further try? I am already using the BIGtec enclosure for another hard drive (NTFS file system) where everything works fine. Do you think it might make sense to try a different enclosure anyway?
Thanks for any responses!
Update #1:
I would like to additionally emphasize that the drive does spin up! Furthermore, here you can see a picture of the two hard drives that I am using and also of the SATA->USB connector. Both hard drives are very similar and I could not even find out the real difference. However, as depicted, the left drive is recognized and mounted without any problems while the right drive is recognized but cannot be mounted nor formatted.
By saying that the right hard drive is recognized, I mean that it shows up using the Disks tool under Linux as you can see in the screenshot.
On first sight, it seems like the file system is not even recognized. That's why I tried to format it with NTFS file system. What you see is the failure message and that magically a (physically not existing) second hard drive shows up in the Disks tool. I really don't have any explanation what's going on here...
As I also was concerned that the hard drive might broken, I was running an extensive badblocks test while connecting the hard drive directly to the SATA port of my laptop. The test that I was running I called by
badblocks -vsn /dev/sdb
and the result that showed up after more than 12 hours testing was
Pass completed, 0 bad blocks found
Thus, the drive seems to still be working correctly... Any suggestions?
Update #2:
According to Jarmunds suggestions, I did the following:
First: I ran the lsblk /dev/sdb, output is
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sdb 8:16 0 232,9G 0 disk
Second: When connecting the drive via USB in windows, the drive spins up, it seems like windows looks for drivers for the drive and installs them successfully. However, there is no drive appearing in the file explorer. Thus, I went to the disk management utility which told me that the drive needs to be initialized (see following screenshot).
No matter which of the two options I choose, a CRC error appears (sorry for the German). 
Afterwards, the disk is shown in the utility but as it has not been initialized correctly, it is also not possible to format it.
Third: dmesg right after connecting the device returns:
[17152.892960] usb 3-1: new SuperSpeed USB device number 10 using xhci_hcd
[17156.597275] usb 3-1: New USB device found, idVendor=174c, idProduct=5106
[17156.597282] usb 3-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=2, Product=3, SerialNumber=1
[17156.597286] usb 3-1: Product: AS2105
[17156.597290] usb 3-1: Manufacturer: ASMedia
[17156.597293] usb 3-1: SerialNumber: WD-WXEZ07H42312
[17156.598247] usb-storage 3-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[17156.598687] scsi12 : usb-storage 3-1:1.0
[17157.595759] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access WDC WD25 00BEVS-75UST0 01.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[17157.595988] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 0
[17157.596173] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/232 GiB)
[17157.596412] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[17157.596414] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 23 00 00 00
[17157.596648] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[17157.596652] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17157.599898] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] No Caching mode page found
[17157.599904] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[17157.600434] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[17157.600438] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb]
[17157.600439] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[17157.600441] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb]
[17157.600442] Sense Key : Medium Error [current]
[17157.600445] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb]
[17157.600447] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error
[17157.600449] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB:
[17157.600450] Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
[17157.600457] blk_update_request: 154 callbacks suppressed
[17157.600458] end_request: critical medium error, dev sdb, sector 0
[17157.600460] quiet_error: 154 callbacks suppressed
[17157.600462] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 0
Note that the lines starting from Medium Error[current] are shown repeatedly in the following lines of dmesg that I didn't paste in here
Thank you a lot for your support here Jarmund!!
Update #3:
Out of desperation I organized 2 additional External HDD Enclosures to test whether it might work with a different hardware. The ones I tried now were:
- SITECOM USB 3.0 SATA 2.5" hard drive case
- ICY BOX USB 2.0 SATA 2.5" External HDD Enclosure Model IB-231StU
I specifically decided to take one working with USB 2.0 and one with USB 3.0. However, as none of these worked neither, I decided to sell my hard drive to people who want to use it with the SATA interface directly. Thus, I won't be able to test out future suggestions.
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