Faulty Drive? or SATA III/II compatibility issue

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ballzac

Member
Howdy,

I just bought a Seagate Barracuda 2TB Sata 6Gb/s drive (ST2000DL003) to put in my HTPC. The HTPC is running XBMC live from a 500GB HD, and the second drive was just for extra storage. The motherboard on the HTPC is an EVGA H55V.

The drive does not show up in BIOS. It doesn't make any clicking noises or anything. I think it's running, but it could be vibrations coming from other components in the computer that I can hear/feel. I've tried it on two other PCs as well. Both with different Gigabyte motherboards. I've tried different SATA cables, and I've tried using cables that are working fine with other drives. All of my other drives have always shown up in BIOS automatically.

All three computers have SATA 3Gb/s ports, so I thought maybe I needed a jumper to set the drive speed. I looked on the Seagate website and they said the jumper on the back is for factory use only. For their 3Gb/s drives, they do indeed explain how to set the jumper for a 1.5Gb/s motherboard. I know this works because I have SATA 3Gb/s drives running in an older computer using this method.

Also wondering if drivers or something are required for the motherboard to detect the drive, and how I would go about installing them on XBMC if this is the case. If these drives aren't easily installed, it's weird that there's not a lot of info about it on the Seagate website. I could understand if it was just one computer that didn't detect it, but considering I've tried on three different computers, either the drive is faulty, or there's some setup procedure that is generally required (perhaps only on SATA 3Gb/s motherboards) that isn't mentioned anywhere.

If anyone has any advice or can think what the problem would be, I'd much appreciate it
I live about 100 miles from the place I bought it from, so I don't really want to take it back if it's not actually faulty, and I think I've exhausted all avenues of googling the drive, motherboard, installation methods and compatibility issues.

Thanks
 
The drive must be partitioned and formatted before you can actually use the drive. You can do both of these by going into disk management.
 
johnb35 said:
The drive must be partitioned and formatted before you can actually use the drive. You can do both of these by going into disk management.
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Even if unpartitioned/unformatted his drive should be detected in the BIOS.

Are you sure you connected the power to the drive.
You say you have tried the drive on other computer.It may be a dead drive.THen open up your case and then run the computer and feel the drive and check whether it is running or not.
But before coming to conclusion first try installing all the SATA controller drivers available on your manufacturer's website,and then try running the drive.
 
mihir said:
Even if unpartitioned/unformatted his drive should be detected in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

Thanks for pointing that out. I must have missed that in his post.

Either missing or bad power or data cable most likely. or bad sata port on motherboard.
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

I have installed it the same way I have installed every SATA 1.5Gb/s and SATA 3Gb/s drive in the past. That includes connecting both the data and power cables. I even made sure I used a power connector that supplies 3.3V (although it shouldn't matter as the drive says on it that it only needs 5V and 12V). I have used half a dozen different data cables and about the same number of power cables, including ones that are currently working for other drives. I have tried it in about a dozen different SATA ports on three different computers that all have different motherboards. It does not show up in BIOS even though all my other other drives are automatically detected. Nor does it show up in GParted (not that I would expect it to).

It looks possible that it's a driver issue. There are firmware/software updates on the EVGA website. I'll have to look into it. Although it seems unlikely that all three computers would be lacking the right drivers considering they all have different motherboards.

Like I said in the initial post, it feels like it's running, but I had it inside the case, so it's possible that I was feeling vibrations coming from the other drive spinning up or from the fans or something. I might have to take it out and sit it outside the box to be sure.
 
ballzac said:
Thanks for the replies guys.

I have installed it the same way I have installed every SATA 1.5Gb/s and SATA 3Gb/s drive in the past. That includes connecting both the data and power cables. I even made sure I used a power connector that supplies 3.3V (although it shouldn't matter as the drive says on it that it only needs 5V and 12V). I have used half a dozen different data cables and about the same number of power cables, including ones that are currently working for other drives. I have tried it in about a dozen different SATA ports on three different computers that all have different motherboards. It does not show up in BIOS even though all my other other drives are automatically detected. Nor does it show up in GParted (not that I would expect it to).

It looks possible that it's a driver issue. There are firmware/software updates on the EVGA website. I'll have to look into it. Although it seems unlikely that all three computers would be lacking the right drivers considering they all have different motherboards.

Like I said in the initial post, it feels like it's running, but I had it inside the case, so it's possible that I was feeling vibrations coming from the other drive spinning up or from the fans or something. I might have to take it out and sit it outside the box to be sure.
Click to expand...

If you have tried it on 3 computers and to no avail there is a high probability that there is something wrong with the PCB of your HDD since you reckon it does not make any clicking noise or something.

Also since I have never used a SATA 6gbps drive on a SATA 3GBPS port so I am not sure whether you would be needing new drivers or not.
But yes a chipset driver upgrade and also a BIOS update and the installation of SATA controller drivers may help but I think there is something wrong with the hard-drive.


Also try taking the drive out of the case and see whether it working or not.
 
If its not showing up in the bios, and you have tried it in three computers. My guess like above, its a bad drive.
 
Thanks for the help guys. My girlfriend took it to work and gave it to the IT guy who said it doesn't work, so time to take it back to the vendor.
 
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