If I Initialize and format a drive on my USB dock, then load it up with data (a backup of a internal drive so I can swap it if internal drive fails). If I remove it from USB dock and install it in the computer it says I have to Initialize the disk (thus negating the backup I made). If i initialize and format the drive in the computer, remove it and put in the USB Dock. I get the same thing, Initialize the disk. Why can't I swap them and retain the data? This happens with multiple GPT formatted Hard drives.
I have a few hard drives across multiple machines 3TB 2008r2 and 2012 server.
Please enlighten me with a solution.

It could be that the dock is a 4K sector bridge, wrapping 8 standard 512 byte sectors into a bigger one if the drive is not 4K native.

Format a drive in the dock and then issue the following command:

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo X:

... where X: is your drive letter.

The "Bytes Per Sector" and "Bytes Per Physical Sector" values will probably be 4096.

Now format the drive in your PC and issue the same command. The "Bytes Per Sector" value will be 512.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

When I break out my backup hard drives (they are off-site), I will try this out. Out of curiosity what does this mean "Bytes Per FileRecord Segment". I looked at my installed drives and they all have 1024, my external Seagate 5g saves 4096. Thanks for both your input. I got in touch with the dock manufacture and he said it was a firmware issue with my drives. (your explanations make a lot more sense to me)

Does this help?

http://www.hexacorn.com/blog/2012/05/04 ... cord-size/

BTW, the reason that Seagate's (and WD's) 3TB+ external drives use 4096-byte sectoring is that this enables them to circumvent the 2TiB limitation for MBR partitions. Such drives can then be used with a legacy OS such as Win XP.

The 2TiB limitation is not a capacity limit per se. Instead it is the capacity that results from the maximum number of sectors (2^32) that can be represented by an MBR partition table. If the sector size is increased by a factor of 8, then the maximum capacity increases from 2TiB to 16TiB.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks for the link and info.