My Gigabyte motherboard won't recognise HD > 2TB

Hi

I have a gigabyte EX58-UD4P motherboard for the Intel i7 on my Win 7 64 bit PS, and I am trying to connect an eSata drive to it which is bigger than 2TB.

When I boot up, the BIOS finds the external hard drive correctly, but the next part in booting comes up with a 0.0GB for that drive. From that point on the operating system does not find the drive at all.

I did experiments with different size external eSata drives and found that 2TB worked correctly, but anything larger (eg, 4TB and 8TB), came up as 0.0GB during boot and would not work.

Any ideas?

The BIOS version of the motherboard is F8.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi newcomer and welcome to the Tom's hardware forum.

Can you see the HDD in your PC?, Can you see the HDD in the disk manager?

Well 'till I know, windows have problems managment with HDD >2TB, this could be the source of your problem.

Download and use Hiren's boot utilities, and use the partition tools to see if this can recognize your HDD, if the software can recognize your HDD, create some partitions and reboot your PC.

^Well, like you says, could be problem of the mobo. Do you try with the gigabyte's support?

I don't think there are any single SATA disks larger than 2 TB, are there? Certainly none as large as 8 TB. So it must be some sort of array, which might well explain the issue.

Hi,

Just to clarify... I have a Drobo S which is effectively a case with hard drives in it. Drobo says that it should appear as a single external hard disk and I can format it to apprear as 2, 4, 8, or 16TB.

My BIOS setting is set to RAID (Intel SATA connections) as I have two internal WD EARS 1.5TB hard disks set up as a Striped array. On the other ports (there are 6 of them) I have a singel 1Tb hard disk (os), and two DVD ROMS.

I have also two Sata Gigabyte connections on the motherboard and I have set these to AHCI so I can plug and play my external esata hard disks. It works well.

My aim is to ALWAYS have my Drobo connected to the Intel sata port so it is found during boot up (POST?). Since this doesn't work as I described above, I have connected it to the Gigabyte AHCI port, but at bootup this is hit and miss. Sometimes it connects correctly and sometimes it says that there is an error with the external hard drive (Drobo). I think this is because the Drobo doesn't wake up in time and the Gigabyte port times out.

Therefore to summarise... I am really aiming to connect my Drobo to the Intel Sata port - but it won't recognise anything larger than 2.0TB. Any way to fix this?

Thanks ijack:

(1) I realise Data Robotics says to set the eSata card to non-raid mode. As I see it, the port the Drobo is connected to is not set to RAID. The intel RAID controller is set for this port not to be RAID. But I may be mistaken.

(2) Yes this is correct if you set up the Drobo as a 2TB drive. With the Drobo you can keep adding drives and so if you exceed the original 2TB volume it will create another one. Therefore in this case you would need a port multiplier.

My aim is to have one 16TB drive (although I only have populated 3TB at the moment).

(3) Yes this is a good link. I was exctited when I saw it last week as it explained my problem perfectly. Alas I already have Microsoft drivers so this KB item doesn't apply to me. I suggest that the motherboard BIOS needs to recognise the drive as non 0.0GB before the operating system will see it.

I have put in a request to Gigabyte support asking whether the motherboard BIOS can recognise drives > 2.0TB as per my configurations. It's the Chinese new year so I don't expect to hear from them until the end of this month.

Keep looking... as I like the way you think.

If the SATA controller internally is set to Legacy or AHCI (i.e. non-RAID) mode, the controller will need to support port multiplication (which a lot of controllers out there right now do not) in order to see multiple hard drives connected via the eSATA interface though a single cable.

For example, I bought a Vantec Nexstar dual hard drive dock (seen here: http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku= [...] e=Vantec). If I populate both hard drive slots with drives and connect it to my desktop or my laptop via eSATA, I cannot see the hard drive connected to the rear slot because the Intel SATA controller on my Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard does not support port multiplication, nor does my Asus G51J laptop. If it then switch cables on the dock from eSATA to USB and hook it up to both my laptop and my desktop, both hard drives are detected and function properly. I bet if you hooked that Drobo up to your computer over USB, every drive would be detected perfectly.