Question 8TB Hdd Not Recognised

Jun 25, 2019
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Hi guys

After a bit of help if anyone can shed some light on this for me please.

I've just bought a new external usb HDD to take the drive out of and install in my desktop. It's a WD elements white label but I can't get it to be recognised.

Works as usb drive and is recognised fine. When I install to a sata port it powers up but isn't recognised in explorer, disk management or diskpart on the pc I want to install in.

I already have a 3tb and 4tb drive in there and from plugging into usb I can tell the 8tb is formatted using gpt.

The motherboard of pc is Gigabyte Ga-990fxa-ud3 rev 1.1 and is running latest bios. The ssd that windows 10 runs on is formatted as mbr. Would that be the issue?

Anyone run into the same problem or have any idea what the issue could be?
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
No, that can't be an issue. You might want to state the make and model of the PSU and it's age. The HDD being missing on the system can be due in part to a lack of BIOS support, whereby anything greater than 2TB will need a BIOS update(for most boards). Since you're on the last revision, per your mention, the BIOS option is exhausted.
 
Jun 25, 2019
6
0
10
No, that can't be an issue. You might want to state the make and model of the PSU and it's age. The HDD being missing on the system can be due in part to a lack of BIOS support, whereby anything greater than 2TB will need a BIOS update(for most boards). Since you're on the last revision, per your mention, the BIOS option is exhausted.

Yeah I'd googled and seen that was an issue. It has previously had 3 and 4tb drives in it though so I guess it can't be down to that.
 
Jun 25, 2019
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0
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Can CrystalDiskInfo see it? If so, could we see the SMART report? I do recall some shucked drives not being accessible via a SATA port, but they were from My Books, not Elements.

Not tried CrystalDsikInfo actually. I'll try when I get in tomorrow. I think I may have just found a youtube video explaining the problem which matches what you say. Apparently certain WD drives sold as externals have the ability to disable power to hdd when plugged in through sata rather than the sata to usb converter. Suggestion is to either use sata to molex adaptor or to tape one of the sata power pins so I'll give this a try tomorrow.