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

[Matthams]

Hi all

I recently got 2 of the Seagate SATA 3TB drives> However when I connected them to my pc and checked the drives in disk managment 1 was showing up as 2.7 TB (as expected) but the other was only 1.8TB. I have done nothing to the drives so far except to plug them in and look at them in disk managment. Does anyone know if there is anything I can do to claim back the missing space or should I just return the drive and get a new one?

Thanks in advance

Dan

[Cantbecanit]

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/Resources-to-overcome-the-2-TB-limitat...

[Matthams]

I think you misunderstand me. Im not having an issue with a partition its the unpartioned total disk size that is showing up as 1.8TB on one disk and 2.7TB on the other.

[Cantbecanit]

Unless you have a EFi bios you must use Discwizard V13 to allocate the remaining portion of the drive, anyway you couldn't have read all the info I linked you in the 10 minutes since, so please have a full read and I think you will find the answer you seek, only other thing I can think of is your board for some silly reason won't support 2, 3TB drives at once, unlikely though, and can you list your hardware I can't keep guessing why without any clues as to what the weather looks like outside,

[Matthams]

I dead the information you sugested last night before posting on here. I also came across this page.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/beyond-2tb/

That states that windows 7 supports these drives when using them as data drives. Are you now telling me that this information is wrong and that windows 7 does not support these drives as data disks and i need to use Diskwizard? I assumed that 1 of them was faulty because of the 2 differant sizes disk managment was showing.

Speaking of not reading if you had read my original post you whould have seen that I said I have done nothing to these drive apart from connecting them and looking at the sizes in disk managment I have not yet tried to set up any kind of partition on the drives.

mysystem is

Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Socket 775. 

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory 

Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB Solid State Drive (boot drive)

2x Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 32MB (these drives will be replaced with the 2 i recently got)

2x Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB

I will try connecting the drives one at a time but I have my doubts that this is the cause of the issue.

[Cantbecanit]

No, I said old bios' don't fully support these drives, there is now a bios called UEFi that allows the bios to recognise the full capacity of larger than 2TB drives, if you don't have that bios, which I know you don't because iirc no 775 board does you will need to use Diswizard to add the missing portion as an additional drive, normally it's a 2TB and 746GB split.

[Cantbecanit]

Follow this

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/3TB-Cuda-XT-Install-Procedure-Progress...

Make sure you have the all the correct drivers loaded to the C drive, i.e if you are Intel which you are you need the V10 RST driver.

[Matthams]

You are still missing my point. I know that BIOS will notfully support these drives.

Lets look at this from another point of view. You are saying that windows 7 will not detect this drive as it is over 2TB and that is why one of my drives is showing in disk managmnt as 1.8TB unallocated space. so why is the second disk being shown as 2.7TB unallocated space?

[Cantbecanit]

I can't answer that 100%, I can tell you that I have had mine show up as a full 2.7 before also, if you follow what I did this should resolve, add the Intel RST drivers to your C drive, the SSD one, and then format the two 3TB ones and then set them up in Discwizard V13 it must be V13 and it must be on your C drive, use the  function for Extended Capacity Disc's, you should have two 2TB drives and then 2 746GB drives showing, so in effect 4 slave drives to the SSD drive.

Or another way to put it, they aren't simply PnP, you have to configure them.

[Cantbecanit]

Above answer is edited so read it through again if you haven't already.