My External HDD is not working on 2 of the 4 USB ports on my iMac. It gets power but it's not reading the HDD.

Hi,
I have an iMac Late 2013 model. My external HD is accessible only on 2 out of the 4 USB ports at the back. When you plug the HD in all 4, it gets power, but the HD's icon will only load on the desktop if you plug it in one of the 2 ports mentioned earlier. This is my first mac and I'm thinking that I should be able to plug my external HD to any one of those ports, right?
If this isn't normal mac behavior, how do it fix it?
Thanks!
Clark

You may have cables that have degraded, try new cables and resetting the SMC per the instructions in Intel iMac SMC and PRAM resets

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