Advanced Format Hard Drive Problem

[adamf154]

I recently bought an advanced format sata III hard drive and it isn't recognized on any of my pc's, i have sata II boards, i have one with windows 10 and one with windows 7, i downloaded the windows 7 updates but that didn't help, i also have a sata docking station which shows the disk works but doesn't recognize it and shows in device manager there is something there but doesn't know what, i have also checked disk management and it doesn't show there and its not in the boot section of bios.

Has anyone else had any bother with an af hard drive, or know of any solutions that might help or is just that sata III just wont work in Sata II slots

Thanks in advance for any help

[DB83]

Sata III drives will work in SataII systems but at SataII speeds.

It is my understanding that full af hard drives do NOT work in a Windows 7 system - there is a 'bridge' system called 512e which emulates a af drive but the drive has to be set up according to the manufacturer's instruction and using their own utility software. They do not work straight out of the box.

Windows 10 fully supports af drives.

[adamf154]

yeah thats what i thought but i put windows 10 on yesterday and its still not recognized

[DB83]

But did you put Windows 10 from a Windows 7 system ?

[adamf154]

im pretty sure it was a clean install, i selected to delete everything, but if its meant to be a totally clean install then i would have to fully format my windows disk, but i would then have to put windows xp on first then put windows ten on as for some reason the windows disk doesn't load from boot, or i would have to put the disk in the other pc fully formatted, then put windows 10 on a fully formatted disk without any other version of windows

[DB83]

XP !! Is there an upgrade path from that ?

I am not familiar with the upgrade process - there is a topic about that on here. Just asked this if it merely looks at the current system and only configures for that.

Even so, there should be the equivalent under Win 10 to search for new hardware.

[adamf154]

well im pretty sure there isn't an upgrade path from xp for windows 7 or 10, but i have all the updates from window 10 as it does it automatically and you cant turn it off, so im totally uptodate

[DB83]

You mentioned XP that is why I got confused.

This is not about updates. This is about your OS - in this case Windows 10 recognising your hardware. And, as I already said, if you have a full af drive then it will NOT work in Win 7 whatever you try.

I just re-read you OP. If the disk does not show in the bios then I do not think Windows sees it. You will need to check the mb manufacturer to see if there is a bios upgrade that supports these drives.

[johnmeyer]

I recently bought an advanced format sata III hard drive and it isn't recognized on any of my pc's,

As already pointed out, SATA III will work with your SATA II controller, but I don't think that is the issue. You say that your drive is "advanced format." I am a little unclear what you mean. If this means that the drive was formatted at the factory, my guess is that the formatting is not being recognized by Windows. Therefore you will have to go through the standard Windows drive preparation in order to use the drive. This process is the same whether you have Windows XP, 7, 8 or 10.

You can find thousands of tutorials on how to do this (just use Google), but here's my short version.

You want to get to the "disk management" section of Windows. To get there, just right click on My Computer and select Manage, or alternatively type "disk management" in the search bar if you have Windows 7 or above. In this dialog you should see your disk drive.

Note: make sure you are operating on this new drive and not some other drive. Most likely the new drive is the only one without a drive letter assigned.

You should be able to tell whether the disk is set up correctly. If the drive is physically recognized, but is not prepared properly, Windows will pop up a disk initialization wizard as soon as you open the Disk Management dialog. In most cases all you have to do is accept the defaults. Then, once it is initialized, you partition the drive. The usual thing is to have a single partition and drive letter (once again, this is the default). Finally, you format the drive. This is what will finally let Windows see and use the drive. Depending on how the drive was set up, this may be the only step you actually have to do. Again, accept the defaults.

I recommend that you do a full format, even though this will take several hours. The reason I recommend this is that during a full format, Windows will discover any bad blocks and will mark them so they don't get used. Since I do a lot of video work, I own dozens of large drives and done this operation many, many times. In all those format operations I'll have to admit that not once has Windows found a bad block, so I guess you could say I wasted a lot of time doing these full formats. However, I sleep better knowing that I won't have a problem down the road.

So, bottom line, the factory formatting, in my experience, usually doesn't work, or it uses settings that are not optimal for Windows. In either case, you'll have to format the drive yourself.

[adamf154]

advanced formatting is a different kind of disk and it is 4k sectors rather than 512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format, the disk is not recognized on my system anywhere, i had a look on the manufacturers site today and my motherboard was not in the compatible list of boards that af disks works on but they might not have checked on these ones

[johnmeyer]

You're right. I guess I haven't run into these yet, so my advice above was not useful. I think DB83 was exactly right, and you should follow his advice.

[lingyi]

You mentioned XP that is why I got confused.

This is not about updates. This is about your OS - in this case Windows 10 recognising your hardware. And, as I already said, if you have a full af drive then it will NOT work in Win 7 whatever you try.

I just re-read you OP. If the disk does not show in the bios then I do not think Windows sees it. You will need to check the mb manufacturer to see if there is a bios upgrade that supports these drives.

I may be missing something, but AF drives are supported by Win 7 and Vista SP1.

From Seagate:

"The key to a smooth transition is a well-educated storage community, so that potential performance pitfalls can be avoided. The most critical aspect of a smooth and successful transition to 4K sectors used in Advanced Format is to promote the use of 4K-aware hard drive partitioning tools. As a system builder, OEM, integrator, IT professional or even an end user who is building our configuring a computer, be sure to:

Use Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 or later) or Windows 7 to create hard drive partitions.
When using third-party software or utilities to create hard drive partitions, check with your vendor to make sure they are updated and confirmed to be 4K aware.
If you have customers who commonly re-image systems, encourage them to make sure their imaging utilities are 4K aware.
If you are using Linux, check with your Linux vendor or your engineering organization to make sure your system has adopted the changes to become 4K aware.
Check with your hard drive vendor for any other advice or guidance on using Advanced Format drives in your systems."

There's also instructions about what may need to be done to Win 7 for compatibility here:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218571en?language=en_US&key=ka03000000...wwlocale=en-us

I just happened to choose Seagate's site to search, but I'm sure each drive maker's site has the same info.

BTW, I'm currently running a mix of 4, 6 & 8TB AF drives (Seagate, WD, HGST) on my SATA II / Win 7 system and never had any issues (*knocks wood*).

[lingyi]

advanced formatting is a different kind of disk and it is 4k sectors rather than 512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format, the disk is not recognized on my system anywhere, i had a look on the manufacturers site today and my motherboard was not in the compatible list of boards that af disks works on but they might not have checked on these ones

Seems your MB doesn't support the drive. You might try a add on SATA card. I''ve been using this one for years http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-6-Port-SATA-Host-Card/dp/B002PX9BX2. I'm currently running my two 8TB Seagate Archive drives on it. I believe it has it's own BIOS since it start up before the System BIOS.

Edit: Might as well get a SATA III card rather the one I use (only SATA II).

[adamf154]

yeah think its the motherboard and the bios updates for both my pc's are from 2009 and 2010, so that was prob before the af came out and the windows 10 one prob wont work so i might update the other one and see if it might work

[adamf154]

You mentioned XP that is why I got confused.

This is not about updates. This is about your OS - in this case Windows 10 recognising your hardware. And, as I already said, if you have a full af drive then it will NOT work in Win 7 whatever you try.

I just re-read you OP. If the disk does not show in the bios then I do not think Windows sees it. You will need to check the mb manufacturer to see if there is a bios upgrade that supports these drives.

I may be missing something, but AF drives are supported by Win 7 and Vista SP1.

From Seagate:

"The key to a smooth transition is a well-educated storage community, so that potential performance pitfalls can be avoided. The most critical aspect of a smooth and successful transition to 4K sectors used in Advanced Format is to promote the use of 4K-aware hard drive partitioning tools. As a system builder, OEM, integrator, IT professional or even an end user who is building our configuring a computer, be sure to:

Use Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 or later) or Windows 7 to create hard drive partitions.
When using third-party software or utilities to create hard drive partitions, check with your vendor to make sure they are updated and confirmed to be 4K aware.
If you have customers who commonly re-image systems, encourage them to make sure their imaging utilities are 4K aware.
If you are using Linux, check with your Linux vendor or your engineering organization to make sure your system has adopted the changes to become 4K aware.
Check with your hard drive vendor for any other advice or guidance on using Advanced Format drives in your systems."

There's also instructions about what may need to be done to Win 7 for compatibility here:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/218571en?language=en_US&key=ka03000000...wwlocale=en-us

I just happened to choose Seagate's site to search, but I'm sure each drive maker's site has the same info.

BTW, I'm currently running a mix of 4, 6 & 8TB AF drives (Seagate, WD, HGST) on my SATA II / Win 7 system and never had any issues (*knocks wood*).

What make of motherboard do you have that runs the af drives

[lingyi]

I'm using an Intel MB from 2007, but I don't think the age of your MB is the issue (directly).

Having done more thinking, research and re-reading your posts, it seems you may have a 4Kn (4k native) drive (as DB83 calls it a "full af") vs. an Advanced Format drive with 512kE(Emulation).

What's the model of the drive? Is it an Enterprise drive (AFAIK, the only 4Kn drives currently available).

If it's a 4Kn drive vs an 512kE drive, you'll likely need to get another drive or another MB (as you've stated your MB isn't listed as compatible) and at least Win 8 (you've got Win 10 so you're good there).

The drives I'm using are all 512kE drives and therefore compatible with Win 7 and the MB I'm using.

[hello_hello]

Sorry for repeating some of what you wrote lingyi. I finished this post before seeing yours.

There's two types of AF drives. Those that are AF but pretend not to be, and those that are AF and don't. The former type will work with anything. I run them with XP (you need a utility to align them properly after formatting with XP). I don't think there's too many native AF drives being made yet because there's still a lot of PCs that wouldn't understand them. Windows 7 doesn't either.

Has it been established if this is a 512 emulation drive (512e) or a native 4K drive (4Kn)? It's probably a dead drive. What's the make and model?

Native 4K drives seem to be pretty rare (large enterprise drives) and hardware support isn't common. Intel desktop SATA controllers don't seem to have any support for native 4kdrives. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/boards-and-kits/000005646.html

I seems odd there'd be very little hardware support for native 4k drives, given the emulation method has been around for a while now and Win 8 supports native 4K. I wonder why that is.

In the emulation topic, my limited understanding is this.....
A 512e drive tells the OS it's a 512 byte sector drive and usually also reports itself as having real 4k sectors (the minimum size data a traditional drive can accept is 512 bytes while for a native 4k drive it's 4k). Win7 and newer can determine the real sector size as well as the emulated sector size, and apparently that helps to ensure writes are padded to a multiple of 4k. If they're not, in order to write 512 bytes of data the drive has to read a whole 4K sector, replace 512 bytes of the data it contains, then re-write the whole 4K sector.
I've not quite worked out how relevant that is in the real world though, as whether a drive is 512 byte or 512 emulation, all Windows NT flavours will format it using 4K clusters by default, the cluster/allocation size being the minimum size allocated to a file, independent of the sector size, so it seems even for older OSs like XP, writes would normally be padded to a multiple of 4K anyway so the drive wouldn't need to go through the so called "read-modify-write" process. No doubt there's a lot more to it than that. If anyone understands more about how that works I'd be keen to learn.

[Budman1]

Might have missed it but when you add a drive, don't you have to use DISKPART or FDISK before system may see it? I know I did on the last 2 in install, one new and one old OS drive I had to remove partitons and create a primary one. My computer couldn't see the drive except under DISKPART.

Just a thought

[adamf154]

well i have updated the bios on both motherboards but it didn't make any difference, i it looks like its 512e it is an hgst Z7K500-500 https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/travelstar-z7k500, my docking station still see's something but doesn't recognize it, it says its a 4k drive with 512 emulation databuffer, i also checked diskpart but it didn't notice it although it was in my docking station, so i might put it in the pc next time i start up and try diskpart

[DB83]

Best to send it back as 'not working'

I do not know this manufacturer but, personally, would stick to the tried and tested eg Western Digital

Thanks to the earlier posters who clarified what I was trying to write. I see many drives now advertised as 'Advance Format' but, as said, I suspect most are just 512k emulation. My last WD, a 2 tb, (bought in 2015) did not make such claims. That was described as 'Intellipower format' whatever that means. However it came pre-formatted and I just did a quick test before using it as is. Win7 reports it as NTFS.

[isapc]

If you have SATA 2 boards then you have motherboards that use BIOS not UFEI.That is most likely your problem. Not the drives them selfs.

[hello_hello]

I honestly can't remember if hard drives show up in Device Manager before they've been initialised. Although the OP mentioned it not making an appearance in the BIOS or Disk Management, so I assumed that meant it was dead.

I've always initialised drives via Computer Management. I don't know if I've ever checked Device Manager first.
He's how to get to it, or if there's a Computer/My Computer shortcut in the start menu, right clicking on it should give you a "Manage" option, like this.
After Computer Management opens and you select Disk Management, it should automatically offer to initialise any un-initialised disc it sees and then step you through the partitioning/formatting process. In the right pane should be a list of drives and/or partitions.

That's how I've formatted drives for as long as I can remember. If it doesn't show up there, it won't show up anywhere and it seems adamf154 has tried all that.

AF 512e drives are fine with a standard BIOS. It shouldn't have anything to do with it being AF or SATA 2. I own a few AF WD Green SATA 2 and SATA 3 drives and they all play nice connected to my 2008 motherboard running XP. Chances are it's just a dead drive. It happens regardless of brand.

I can only vouch for HGST through my experience with a single drive, and that's before Hitachi became HGST. It's a 2TB Deskstar. At the moment total power on time is 1925.8 days or 5.28 years.
Mind you it's just old enough not to be an AF drive.

[adamf154]

i think its a motherboard problem as it shows something in device manager when i put it in my docking station it just doesn't know what it is but the drive def works as far as i know as the light on the docking station flashes when u put the disk in, if the disk doesn't work then nothing happens with the light

[hello_hello]

My last WD, a 2 tb, (bought in 2015) did not make such claims. That was described as 'Intellipower format' whatever that means. However it came pre-formatted and I just did a quick test before using it as is. Win7 reports it as NTFS.

It'll be an AF drive. At some point WD stopped making a fuss about it. I have a WD20EZRX drive here and there's no mention of AF on it, but it is. For WD Green drives "intellipower" seems to be WD-speak for "we're not saying how fast it spins" but the consensus seems to be 54000 RPM.
That's not necessarily bad. They run cooler, make less noise, and thanks to AF and higher platter densities they're not slow. The 2TB WD Green drives I have are faster than my old 500MB 7200 RPM drives.

In theory the WD drive model number should tell you stuff about a drive. This seems to apply accurately to the WD20EZRX drive in front of me (pdf). http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-001028.pdf

WD = WD
20 = two point zero, I think
E = TB/3.5"
Z = Desktop AF drive
R = 5400RPM 64MB Cache
X = SATA 6Gb/s

It also seems to apply to the WD20EARS drive I have, except A = Desktop, but no AF is mentioned, yet it has AF information on the drive sticker. Maybe it was made before WD decided to assign Desktop AF drives a different letter. It was manufactured in 2010.

[hello_hello]

i think its a motherboard problem as it shows something in device manager when i put it in my docking station it just doesn't know what it is but the drive def works as far as i know as the light on the docking station flashes when u put the disk in, if the disk doesn't work then nothing happens with the light

Is it the drive showing up in Device Manager or the dock? My USB3 dock appears as "Disk Drive" under "Disk Drives" in Device Manager without a drive drive in it. Even right clicking and selecting "properties" doesn't immediately give it away. When I select the "Volume" tab and click "populate" it shows a capacity of 0MB. That's all XP-speak. It might be different for Win7.

The drive controller could be talking gibberish to the MB or docking station. I had a drive die about 5 months ago and when I put it in a dock the light would do lots of flashing but it wouldn't show up in Windows. I'm pretty sure it didn't show up in Disk Management either after it died (connected to MB). It worked for quite a while, then one day..... not so much. I'm pretty sure it was still spinning because I remember connecting it to the MB and disconnecting it several times and I could hear it spinning up. I have a SATA data and power cable hanging out of the back of the PC for that sort of thing, and it supports hot-swapping. Even after a reboot though the drive wasn't communicating with anyone.

[adamf154]

i think its a motherboard problem as it shows something in device manager when i put it in my docking station it just doesn't know what it is but the drive def works as far as i know as the light on the docking station flashes when u put the disk in, if the disk doesn't work then nothing happens with the light

Is it the drive showing up in Device Manager or the dock? My USB3 dock appears as "Disk Drive" under "Disk Drives" in Device Manager without a drive drive in it. Even right clicking and selecting "properties" doesn't immediately give it away. When I select the "Volume" tab and click "populate" it shows a capacity of 0MB. That's all XP-speak. It might be different for Win7.

The drive controller could be talking gibberish to the MB or docking station. I had a drive die about 5 months ago and when I put it in a dock the light would do lots of flashing but it wouldn't show up in Windows. I'm pretty sure it didn't show up in Disk Management either after it died (connected to MB). It worked for quite a while, then one day..... not so much. I'm pretty sure it was still spinning because I remember connecting it to the MB and disconnecting it several times and I could hear it spinning up. I have a SATA data and power cable hanging out of the back of the PC for that sort of thing, and it supports hot-swapping. Even after a reboot though the drive wasn't communicating with anyone.

It comes up with an error sign whenever i put the hard drive in the docking station

[hello_hello]

It must be a faulty drive.

[DB83]

My last WD, a 2 tb, (bought in 2015) did not make such claims. That was described as 'Intellipower format' whatever that means. However it came pre-formatted and I just did a quick test before using it as is. Win7 reports it as NTFS.

It'll be an AF drive. At some point WD stopped making a fuss about it. I have a WD20EZRX drive here .

That is precisely the drive I acquired in 2015.

And my MB is much older and has only SATAII slots.

Methinks this new system beyond the traditional BIOS is only pertinent when booting to a large drive.

Now I have to share an experience which is documented in an earlier thread when I upgraded my system to Win7 (from XP) and acquired an ssd for the boot drive. The drive was not showing in the bios etc. And I was swearing that all cabling was correct. Turned out that atleast one of the cables, maybe both had missed the connector(s) and not doing this very often one does not get a lot of practice with what can be a fiddly operation - the old IDE drives were so much easier.

So to the OP. DO check and double check your data AND power cables going in to the drive.

I also just wonder if the mb manufacturer is just reporting non-compatablity with native AF drives since it would be an absolute nightmare if most consumer drives were now AF (512e) and could not be installed.

[lingyi]

It must be a faulty drive.

+1 It definitely sounds like the drive is faulty. Take Windows out of the equation and run a live Linux distribution from a CD or flash drive. If the drive isn't recognized in Linux, it's bad. If it is recognized, you can format it as ex-Fat (don't remember if Linux does NTFS) and try it again. Windows recognizes ex-FAT format drives.

A couple of thoughts about your docking station:

Try different USB ports (ideally USB 2.0 to 3.0 or vice versa if possible). I'm currently having an odd issue with my USB docks. When one is plugged into my USB 3.0 port (I'm using an add in card), it "loses" drives (i.e. when I put in a new drive, it doesn't show up or says the drive needs to be "initialized" in Disk Managment). Switched to USB 2.0 and all is fine.

Don't plug your dock into a USB hub and if you do, use a powered hub (ideally with an external power supply). Multiple devices (especially hard drives) on an unpowered hub can cause errors.

[adamf154]

well i have used other drives in the docking station inbetween trying to get that one to work and its fine with them, the wires have all been secure when connected to the hard drive