@ AJK Your drive is exactly what im talking about - up to a few years ago all the external drives were connected via the standard sata port to a little board that turned into a usb. The newer portable drives, in an attempt to make the drive a little smaller, cut out that piece and soldered the usb directly to the hard drive. Although more compact it causes multiple issues since this isn't the natural interface - it has to interpert the connection thru the usb controller.
Here's a classic scenario that happens all the time - the drive gets a couple of bad sectors and starts failing, with a standard drive it will still be detected and you can properly copy off all your data however with the usb onboard drive it can't get past these bad sectors to further connect to the drive - as a result the drive powers up, but nothing further happens - you don't see any data.
They also have multiple firmware issues that cause chaos on these drives.