Need help Installling a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hardrive

Mackloutz

Honorable
May 11, 2013
1
0
10,510
I bought a Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard drive from amazon and am having trouble installing it. My order came with the hard drive only, no manual, startup discs, etc. I have my wires installed correctly, 10pin, and sata, but am confused which slot to insert sata cable. There are 6 separate slots, two white, and four light blue. The two whites are labeled: Sata6G_1, Sata6G_2. The four light blues are labeled: Sata3G_1, Sata3G_2, Sata3G_3, and Sata3G_4. I've been in my disk management and the drive isn't there. Only my disk 0. 2,3,4 are all labeled no media. Is there something I'm forgetting or doing wrong? Please Help

The desktop is an ASUS CM6870-US012S. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009PHVZJE/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

3.4 GHz Core i7-3770
RAM 16 GB DDR3
Hard Drive 2000 GB SATA
Graphics Coprocessor NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
Graphics Card Ram Size 2000 MB
Wireless Type 802.11bgn
Number of USB 2.0 Ports 6
Number of USB 3.0 Ports 4

Expand Other Technical Details
Brand Name Asus
Series Desktop
Item model number CM6870-US012S
Hardware Platform PC
Operating System Windows 8
Processor Brand Intel
Processor Count 4
Computer Memory Type SDRAM
Hard Drive Interface Serial ATA
Hard Drive Rotational Speed 7200 RPM
Optical Drive Type BD-Combo
 
Mac look at your mb guild. Some 6g Sata ports are data drives only on third party chipset. If the 6g are intel or amd use any of the 6g port. On the back of the hard drive are two l shaped connectors. The larger on is for power the smaller is the data cable. If both are connected right the drive should spin and you should be able to feel it. In the bios under hard drives it should show up.new drives don't always show up in my computer with a new drive letter.some times you have to use windows disk management to put a portion on the drive and format it.
 

molletts

Distinguished
Jun 16, 2009
477
4
19,165
Depending on your motherboard, you may need to select the port you've connected the drive to in BIOS Setup and change "No media" to "Auto" (Dell systems often seem to work like this). If you're not sure, try setting all of them to "Auto" then save & restart and go straight back into Setup to see which one it is. You might find startup a bit slow if you leave them all set to "Auto" (the BIOS may hang around for ages waiting for non-existent disks to respond) so you may want to set the rest back to "No media".

The white ports labelled Sata6G are the newer SATA 6Gbps ports. The others are the older SATA 3Gbps standard. The latest versions of the Caviar Black have a 6Gbps interface but it probably doesn't make that much difference as the drives don't come anywhere near the speed of a 3Gbps port except for cached reads and writes. You may possibly need to look elsewhere in setup for options relating to the 6Gbps ports - some boards use an additional SATA chip to provide them if the main chipset doesn't support SATA 6Gbps.
 
Hi

It would help if you said what motherboard you have (make & model)
sometimes there are only one chipset SATA controller
[ 2 connectors with SATA III the rest SATA II connectors for modern Intel chipsets]

sometimes there is an additional controller which has to be activated in the BIOS before it will work
and requires additional drivers
even the main SATA ports can be disabled in the BIOS settings

Normally a motherboard comes with a motherboard manual and a driver disk
You may not get these but they can be found on the motherboard manufacturers web site

you do not get any manual or CD disk with OEM hard disks

retail hard disks usually have some documentation often on CD along with diagnostics & disk duplication software
you can also find those at WD's web site

Have you been into the BIOS to see what hard disk and DVD drives are detected
If the drive is not seen by the BIOS it will not be seen by Windows

Also look in device manager to see if it shows up there

regards
Mike Barnes