Boggin, I wrote another reply and posted it but it has not appeared so here it is again. I have four external USB ready cased 2 TB drives i.e. Seagate Desktop etc. and they are recognised by W8.1. It is only the ones I bought cases for that are not recognised. Slotting them uncased into a Docking Station also recognises them. The cases I bought have their own power supply and are SATA 3.5 USB 2.0 on/off switched aluminium cases. The 2TB drives were hooked up to the now defunct Vista computer but I want to use them on a new Desktop computer hopefully to be bought by April/May. I just want a drive to connect to the laptop for backups etc.