bookworm370 - I have 7 drives in total even though only 3 are connected and they all have the same results. 6 of them are Western Digital 2.5" 2TB My Passport Ultra which were bought in 2016 or before but the same model. Each one was formatted in a different year(s) 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 as each was formatted after the previous drive was full of recordings. The 7th one was formatted yesterday which is also a Western Digital 2.5" 2TB current model as I just got it directly from Western Digital a week ago. All 7 showed the exact same partition table except the total capacity is slightly different between the first 6 and the last one because it probably uses a different internal drive model. What I also noticed is you know with the Hopper 3 when the drive is connected already at bootup or even when I plug it in when the Hopper 3 is already fully restarted, the behavior is different between the way the model from the first 6 behaves compared to the 7th one. What happens is you can see the HDD activity led blink for maybe 5 minutes which is either one drive or three drives before you will see the message of each drive detected which will never be at the same time but if there are more than one drive, it will detect the first one then maybe detect the next one a minute later with detect meaning the message that calls it External Drive x so all drives not detected yet would all had the HDD Led blink until they get detected. This also takes the same amount of time even on 3.5" 2TB Western Digital and Samsung drives. However, the 7th drive mentioned above takes 1-2 seconds to show the detection after I plugged it in while the Hopper 3 is up and running. The other thing interesting is when looking at the transfer progress, it takes a shorter amount of time before the bar shows more green. All 7 of them have USB 3.2 cables which Western Digital on the box calls Superspeed USB-A 5.0 Gbps cables. I compared the boxes and it appears the first 6 mentions Windows 8 but no mention of hardware encryption anywhere while the 7th one mentions Windows 10+ and 256bit AES hardware encryption. The 7th drive is where the screenshot came which I actually formatted twice before doing the screenshot with the same results. The first time, I forgot to disconnect one of the existing 3 drives on the Radio Shack USB 3.x hub (I need to look for the box to find what x is but it was Radio Shack a few years before they gone under) because I unplugged a powered off USB 3.0 to SerialATA/Parallel HDD cable connected 3.5" drive instead and it asked to format which I selected on the main screen when prompted but on the next screen, nothing happens when I click on format until I disconnected one of the three other drives except the format finished in 1 minute and when the drive was selected, it did show 0% used and also the capacity was correct when I selected recordings to transfer but not proceed with the transfer which was why I connected the drive to Windows originally to format it but all I could do was delete the partitions and then add a single simple partition in NTFS with the defaults using 100% of the capacity and assigned the drive letter as D: but while it did partition, the format failed and never started even though it was assigned a drive letter as it kept saying the drive was offline and said to assign a drive letter so I did which shows up correctly but manual format would still not proceed with the exact same message of being offline and to assign a drive letter and manually format so I did the safety hardware eject and plugged it back into the Hopper 3 which did the two layer format prompt again and after sometime, didn't time it but it was more than 5 minutes, the format progress screen disappeared but the drive never got detected even 7-8 hours later so I connected it back to the computer to do the screenshot and when I plugged it in, it took 1-2 seconds to show the device was detected as External Device 1. During that 6-7 hours, I also connected the other 6 drives and they all had the same partition table as the screenshot where there were 4 partitions, the first one being 1GB, then two 500GB partitions followed by the 1GB partition.
I don't have a real Linux machine here anymore as I only have Windows Subsystem for Linux running with Ubuntu. I haven't done partitioning in such a long time in Windows that the last time I did it was in the 2000s in Windows XP prior to this so when I deleted and partition the drives, I had to actually google the various types of partitions that can be created which included I believe simple, spanned, striped and I think the last one was mirrored but I chose Simple and just took the defaults as the size was the entire drive so basically to get the drive to format the second time on the Hopper 3, I deleted the existing partitions and created a new simple partition using the defaults and 100% of the space but couldn't get the format part working which probably didn't matter as the Hopper 3 probably only need to see it was some other type of FS and not what it wants before it will partition and format even though they call it formatting.
I just tried gparted on Ubuntu under WSL but it seems to only see the virtual hdd's and not the physical hdd's. Not sure if Windows based partition managers will show the actual layout out or not.
Update, I was originally going to use the free one from Minitool but then decided on AOMIE instead and this is not the 7th drive but the 1st of the 6 drives that was not plugged in to the USB 3.x hub on the Hopper 3 that was formatted in 2016 and this is what it shows, I blurred out Disk 0 which is my computer's internal 1TB SSD so only the information for the drive in question formatted by the Hopper 3 shows:
And this is one where the formatted date was sometime after November 7, 2012 but prior to February 7, 2016 on a Hopper 1 aka Hopper 2000 on a 3.5" 2TB Samsung which is connected to a ThermalTake BlackX docking station which worked with the Hopper 1 but not the Hopper 3 unless I connected the same HDD using a USB 3.0 to SATA/PATA cable instead as it will keep responding will only show a partial recordings list and when one tries to watch, it will say waiting for device to spin up or something to that effect:
