POCEH, thanks.
I'm not sure what worker logs you mean, but I've searched through quite a few logs and haven't come away with any evidence about a problem detecting the device. But I certainly could have missed something. If you could give me a more specific place to look and the type of message I'm looking for, that would be very helpful to me.
But are you sure that USB-connected SATA hard drives are not eligible to add to virtual guests by design? There seem to be numerous articles that indicate USB is supported by WS 8, like KB 2019644 (sorry I don't know how to insert a link to it here). Could you point me to any documentation on what types of connections actually work for external drives, I can't seem to find that either?