Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[rogerpre]

After extensive testing I have found that although the Asmedia ASM1061 based cards such as the Syba SY-PEX40039 works with most drives including 3TB Hitatchi drives, this card does not work with some Seagate 3TB drives such as the Barracuda ST3000DM001.  This chipset is also built into many Asus and Asrock motherboards.

I've gone so far as to upgrade the ASM1061 firmware to 0.95, and the Windows 2008 drivers to 1.3.4.  The HD also has the most current firmware.

It will create and quickformat GPT partitions, but writing to the drive is erratic and will stall, and in some hardware configurations will prevent the computer from booting if one of these drives is connected.

Has anyone else had experience with these drives and this SATA chipset who can suggest a solution?  I suspect the only fix is newer ASM1061 firmware due to the booting issue.  Keep in mind I'm not using the drive as a boot drive.  Before the OS even starts to load, it will fail to boot until I disconnect the drive indicating this is a firmware issue, not a driver issue.

Roger

[timbck2]

I'm using an ASMedia 1061 card (a PCIe card made by Syba/IOCrest) with a Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 and it's working fine. Except my drive is dying (making funny sounds and producing SMART alerts, I already have an RMA going on it). But that has nothing to do with the controller. I have firmware 0.95 and the latest drivers installed.

[rogerpre]

My drive is formatted as one 3TB GPT partition.  It used quick format option when I prepared the drive.  Was your drive setup the same way?  Perhaps it will work as 2 MBR partitions, however that doesn't really help me.

[timbck2]

I partitioned and formatted mine exactly the same way - one 3TB GPT NTFS partition.

[paulb47]

I had no luck all with a Seagate ST3000DM001 (3TB) & an ASM161 Sata III card.   That combination was first of all a complete showstopper for XP 32bit--with either the Brain-Damaged Acronis OEM TrueImage AKA Diskwizard or Paragon's GPT Utility that allows 32bit XP to recognize GDP  VS MBR and see all 3 TB.

The seagate drive worked fine on that hardware with WIN7 but even formatting it out into 3 partitions in both Win7 and again in Ubuntu--once XP took a look it saw inaccessible drives and would usually only recognize 875 GB.   Plugging the drive in as an external,  XP saw 2GB

On another machine with a Marvell card I had somewhat better luck.  Acronis (the full 2012 version) could successfully map out the entire 3TB--except it wanted to put it as an extended partition on an existing Seagate 300 GB drive.   The Acronis extended partition solution is a clumsy one at best.  The drive configured on one machine would be very unlikely to be portable to another.

I had enough fun with Seagate when they first introduced their 1.5TB drives with "Green" technology that pretty much had the drives crash after about 3 weeks.  It's Legendary Internetz databasing--tracing the sheer scale of that disaster.    I lost 3TB of Data because in the 2 weeks it took both drives to crash (one external; one internal) I didn't have enough space to back them up yet.   Seagate wanted to RMA me replacmens.  I had a different idea--see attachment.

This Barracuda is going back to Amazon.  Too bad Samsung and Maxtor also now fall under the Seagate umbrella but there's still plenty of viable competition.  None of the other brands have been as problematic for me as Seagate over the last 4 years--and they used to be my favorite drive. 

[MartinBeaulne]

I just bought a  « 2 eSATA 2 SATA 3.0 to PCI-E PCI Express Card Adapter Converter 6.0Gbps ASM1061 » from Ebay, and two monsters ST3000DM001.

I first installed the drivers in my windows 7 Precision 690 machine, then plugged the chip in, and the disks.

Works almost like charn. The « almost » refers to a a video playback stopping from time to time from the hdd... but I only tried that single video, maybe it's a problem with the file itself...

Anyway, I confirm the ASM1061 chip can discover and play with the 3TB disks. Easily.