Bitlocker - Device attached to the system is not functioning

Feb 2017
This is a fairly simple one, but annoying none the less. I get the following error when I try to enable bitlocker on new drives.
Bitlocker - Device attached to the system is not functioning
It's a pretty odd error, and the way I get around it is to copy 3 or 4GB of data to the drive, then enable bit locker as normal.