windows 7 64bit and secondary data 3TB HDD not visible in full capacity

[deejay.2001]

hi
i have asus m2n-sli deluxe , bios 0307,windows 7 ultimate 64bit and somehow my secondary data 3tb drive is seen just like 746gb...

i believe windows has native support of secondary drive to see 3tb?
where can be a problem? in older bios? (but bios see 3TB perfectly...just disk manager sees 746gb)

thanks for help

[jman98]

I'll warn you. I've got a Gigabyte motherboard and I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and I've gigantic stability issues with my two 2 TB Seagate drives. I can only imagine the "fun" you're going to have with a 3 TB drive. When I say "stability issues" what I mean is that my drives simply vanish from a working system. My boot drive is a 256 GB SSD. That works without any problems. But I use the 2 TB drives as scratch space and during large write operations the disk being written to will vanish. This causes crashes, freezes, etc. Not good.

I've had some suggestions that partitioning my drives into 1 TB or smaller chunks MAY provide added stability, but I have not tried that yet. I think you are right that Windows should see the drive as a 3 GB drive. Maybe you need to play with BIOS settings to get the drive fully seen. I had to use the AHCI setting in my BIOS. Until I did that I couldn't even get the drives to be seen at all.

[redwudz]

I haven't had any problems with large drives on my Gigabyte MBs. I'm running a couple of 2TB (Samsung) drives over eSATA on the PC in my computer details and I have several more 1.5TB drives on other GB PCs, though it may be a issue with certain MBs. But I do run most of them in AHCI mode.

I would repartition and reformat the drive from Disk Manager and see if it fixes the issue. If not, check with Asus. You might find a user forum on their site that could give you more information.

But it may just as likely be a problem with the drive itself. I assume you have also installed the latest HDD MB drivers from Asus? Updating BIOS is usually not necessary unless it addresses a particular problem you have.

Also, if you aren't using AHCI already on your PC, you would have to change that in BIOS and you may have to make a registry change to get it to work. AHCI is easier to install when you install the OS.

[deadrats]

When I say "stability issues" what I mean is that my drives simply vanish from a working system.

the only times i have ever seen such a thing is when either the drive controller is going bad or loose sata cables, i used to have two 500 gig hdd that would just disappear under xp 64, on a lark i checked the sata cables and noticed that they were loose, so i swapped in 2 cables with clips that held the cable securely to the hdd's and viola, problem solved.

[jman98]

I appreciate your comments, deadrats. Believe it or not this is actually my first home PC with SATA anything on it and I have to admit that in hindsight the type of cable I am using seems less than optimal. I know exactly what kind of cables you are talking about so I may give that a shot.

redwudz - Some people are adamant that Gigabyte's HDD drivers are crap and you're better off staying with the standard Windows ones. It wasn't really my original plan to do so, but the Gigabyte manual didn't make it completely clear to me that you had to take special steps at install time to get their drivers installed so I just used the standard Windows ones by accident.

[deadrats]

hi
i have asus m2n-sli deluxe , bios 0307,windows 7 ultimate 64bit and somehow my secondary data 3tb drive is seen just like 746gb...

i'm fairly certain that chipset doesn't support 3tb hdd's, in fact if i had to bet money on it i would say that it probably maxes out at supporting 1 tb hdd's.

i can't find any conclusive proof but looking through various tech forums it seems that when users try to pair that motherboard with 1.5 or 2 tb hdd's, they experience problems like you describe, conversely i can't find anyone that had any issues with that motherboard and 1 tb hdd's, so i'm forced to conclude that the onboard chipset is limited to 1 tb hdd's.

you will most likely have to buy an add in controller card, one of the newer ones that support 3 tb hdd's (not all do, most max out at 1.5 tb).

that's the problem with these massive hdd capacities, you need the absolute latest chipsets in order to use them.

[jagabo]

I agree with deadrats, the controller and BIOS probably doesn't support 64 bit LBA and EFI.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3981/western-digital-caviar-green-3tb-and-my-book-essent...ves-reviewed/2

If it came with a controller card you'll have to use that. Or you can put it in an external USB 2.0 or 3.0 enclosure.

All current 64 bit versions of Windows support >2TB drives.

[oldfart13]

Win 7 32 bit with old Foxconn MB (2006 vintage) with 2TB Iomega (Samsung) sees the full capacity of the drive just fine. I agree, it's probably a cable (mechanical) or else mobo needs update. Check your drivers...

[deejay.2001]

thank for replies...

so far i have upgraded latest bios to 1701
i have installed latest chipset drivers nforce_win7_64bit_15.53
but still no luck
bios sees 3tb correctly but just diskmanager sees only 746gb.
so far dont know where can be issue....

is anyone using other 3tb drive internal WD30EZRSDTL directly plugged with sata cable without HBA card involved and see 3tb natively as 3tb with gpt formatted?

thanks

[autodidact]

It would seem that you are using a MBR partition on the 3TB drive and not a GPT partition as the 746GB is an anomaly of windows only displaying the unusable space on the drive as a result of the limitations of MBR. I would suggest re-partitioning the drive from scratch.

[jman98]

Apologies for sort of hijacking this, but people do read our threads years down the road so a brief follow up might be appropriate.

deadrats completely nailed my problem. I went to Fry's yesterday evening and bought 2 new SATA III cables with right angle connectors on one side (I was previously using straight connectors). I replaced both of my cables on my 2 TB drives and I have no more stability issues. I repeated a job that was causing the drives to disappear and it completed without a problem. My drives have not disappeared since I started using the new SATA cables. They seem much more secure than the old ones.

[redwudz]

I think it's all good information. I wasn't aware that there were problems with large HDDs with some motherboards or controllers. The biggest HDDs I have at present are 2TB, but they are on fairly new MBs. I have four or five 1.5TB drives. I prefer the Silicon Image chipsets for PCI(E) HDD controller cards. But I have an older Promise TX4 controller that seems to work fine with 1.5TB drives.

I have had problems with loose SATA connectors and I have changed over to the latching type connectors. I notice my newer MBs usually come with latching connectors, so I suspect they are aware of the problem.

SATA connectors are sort of a poor design for a mechanical connection, so the latching connectors are a big improvement. But I have damaged a MB connector when the latch didn't release and I pulled too hard. A bit of glue and a careful replacement of the plastic part of the connector saved it, but I am more careful now to insure the latch fully releases.

[gergohad]

thank for replies...

so far i have upgraded latest bios to 1701
i have installed latest chipset drivers nforce_win7_64bit_15.53
but still no luck
bios sees 3tb correctly but just diskmanager sees only 746gb.
so far dont know where can be issue....

is anyone using other 3tb drive internal WD30EZRSDTL directly plugged with sata cable without HBA card involved and see 3tb natively as 3tb with gpt formatted?

thanks

Hi,

Im having the exact same problem with the exact same disc. I'm also running Win7_64bit. bios also sees 3tb.
Did you find a solution?

[Nelson37]

Yes he did, and posted the answer.

[TooLFooL]

Yes he did, and posted the answer.

no he did not... the problem of vanishing drives has been resolved with better sata cables. the 3Tb HDD problem was not solved.



the 3TB problem is: current motherboard design is obsolete. your pc will not see more than 2.2TB unless you meet the following requirements:

64 bit operating system
GUID partition table
BIOS with UEFI

the MBR partition table simply cannot handle more than 2.19 TB.
UEFI is Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which is actually a replacement for BIOS.

more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface