Installing a large hard disk

Hello!


If this has been asked before, please point me to the relevant thread. A friend of mine recently bought a hard disk 8TB and he did not manage to install it correctly. Unfortunately I live far from him and I will have the chance to visit him at weekend. Before that, I would like to ask, can such a disk be installed in any modern system? He has an MSI s1151 chipset Z270 motherboard, so I guess there is no compatibility issues. Is there any setting he should do in BIOS/UEFI firmware for such large disk? What about the power requirements? He has a modular 850W PSU, so again I guess he should be OK, as long as he connects the power cable to the correct socket on the PSU. I saw his desktop with TeamViewer and the disk is reported as unknown disk in Device Manager and as 0 capacity in Disk Management. I'm sure he did something wrong with the cables, but I cannot tell until I visit him. Anything else I should know? Yes, I know that I have to initialize it as GPT in order to make a single 8TB partition. Anything more?


Thank you in advance!

It seems this may not be straight forward other post have reported the disks won't work on some systems as they can't handle above 4 TB.

Yes, but the hardware was bought last week and the motherboard is an MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon s1151 with Z270 chipset, so this should be compatible, I'll see in MSI site to confirm it. Unless there is any setting in BIOS that must be done for such large disk. I am not familiar with disks over 2TB, so I cannot tell.

I have a Gigabyte Z77 mobo and a Seagate 8TB working fine in my pc running win 10.

I cannot see this being a problem on this newer hardware.

The easiest thing to do is install MiniTool Partition Wizard free. In Partition Wizard, right click on the drive, select Initialize GPT. Then create as many partitions as you want on it and assign a drive letter to each partition. It sounds like the disk is physically connected OK, it just needs to be partitioned and formatted.

The physical connection is easy - one data cable between the drive and a SATA port on the motherboard and a standard SATA power connection. The connections are keyed so they can only be connected to the correct ports and in the proper direction. The SATA port needs to be enabled in UEFI - but if the user did not go into UEFI setup and disable the SATA port, it should be enabled by default. Unless you are using RAID (which it does not sound like), the SATA ports should also be set for AHCI and not IDE.

Many people will say you don't need Partition Wizard and just do it in Windows, and you can, but using Partition Wizard will make it easier for a less experienced user to do.

This is the data connector that will go between the hard drive and the SATA port on the motherboard:



This is the power connector from the PSU:

Well he told me that now the disk is seen in Windows. I connected with TeamViewer but got an error while trying to initialize it as GPT. I am not sure if the mode is set to IDE or AHCI. It could be that. But if it is set to IDE and he has installed Windows, is it possible to switch to AHCI? Thanks.

spapakons said:

Well he told me that now the disk is seen in Windows. I connected with TeamViewer but got an error while trying to initialize it as GPT. I am not sure if the mode is set to IDE or AHCI. It could be that. But if it is set to IDE and he has installed Windows, is it possible to switch to AHCI? Thanks.

I don't think IDE v. AHCI mode will affect anything other than performance. To go from IDE to AHCI mode, you FIRST boot Windows into safe mode, uninstall the IDE controller under disk controllers in Device manager. Then shut down the computer completely. Go into UEFI/BIOS setup the next restart, change to AHCI. Boot Windows again into safe mode (which Windows 10 will do automatically). Then change it to boot into normal mode and reboot.

Thanks for the info. But I'm afraid my friend has done some damage to the disk. Since I won't be seeing him until the weekend I advised him to go the computer back to the store and ask the Service to connect and format the disk for him. If he did anything wrong and damaged the disk, he will say nothing and hopefully they will replace it under Warranty. I know this is not very honest, but there is no easy way to find out and the Provider might actually replace it for the shop too. I work as RMA Technician and I have sent many such disks without visible damage and got replaced under Warranty. Unless the disk has some burnt or other visible damage, of course. Let's see what the store Service will say...

It's really dang hard to damage a SATA hard drive when installing it, except for a big static discharge. If it's defective, 90% chance he received it that way.