Windows 7 Pro x64, my external hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar Black.
The hard drive is connected via USB (tried all my 2.0 and 3.0 ob my Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7) but once I initialized it in the "disk management" (or whatever the proper term is; I'm using a German edition of Windows) I have to assign it a manual drive letter. Otherwise it doesn't show up.
I'm confused because usually externally connected drives (be it USB sticks or real hard disks) just show up as "Removable media", but this one doesn't.
Is this OK/expected? Will there be troubles when I go to another Windows computer?
I formatted the drive with quick format and NTFS. I changed the permissions to have read/write for "Everyone" on that drive.
Best Answer
USB flash drives show up as removable media because they are made using flash RAM, so it's like a memory card rather than a actual drive. A hard drive on the other hand, is well, a hard drive, not flash RAM (SSD's are also just like flash drives for the most part), therefore for the computer to recognize the mass storage unit you connected to it, it requires a drive letter, even if via USB, since to the computer unless you are attempting to install a OS on the drive, will see it as a normal hard drive.