Unless you unplugged their power cables while the computer was on, or let them fall to the ground, there is little chance you broke them.
Good luck with the dock!
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Can anyone shed any light onto my HDD visibility issues?!
- Thread starter Rtorbs
- Start date
Are any of the drives from shucked external enclosures? There are some drives (WD, IIRC) made for external enclosures that use an optional part of the SATA power standard (intended for server use) where pin ... 11, I think, on the power connector is used as a sense wire of some sort, and the drive won't initialize if there's power supplied to that pin or it's shorted to neighbouring pins (as it would be with a standard power supply). The solution for these drives is insulating the relevant pin on the power connector. But if all the drives were bought as bare drives (and are consumer models) this shouldn't matter.
More of a general question: are your drives spinning up when connected to power (listen/feel for vibrations when you connect them/turn on the PSU)? Was the previous build a Windows PC? Did you have the drives configured in any particular way (Storage Space, RAID, etc.)? Have you tried connecting the drives one by one without the SSD connected? Have you tried switching the SATA mode in the BIOS?
Looking at your motherboard manual (if it's the B450 I Aorus Pro Wifi?) there's an option for SATA Boot support (related to fast boot settings) that can disable all SATA devices except the last used boot device through the boot sequence - try changing this?
The settings for enabling/disabling the SATA controllers are called "APU SATA Port Enable" and "Chipset SATA Port Enable", under the Chipset tab in the BIOS.
More of a general question: are your drives spinning up when connected to power (listen/feel for vibrations when you connect them/turn on the PSU)? Was the previous build a Windows PC? Did you have the drives configured in any particular way (Storage Space, RAID, etc.)? Have you tried connecting the drives one by one without the SSD connected? Have you tried switching the SATA mode in the BIOS?
Looking at your motherboard manual (if it's the B450 I Aorus Pro Wifi?) there's an option for SATA Boot support (related to fast boot settings) that can disable all SATA devices except the last used boot device through the boot sequence - try changing this?
The settings for enabling/disabling the SATA controllers are called "APU SATA Port Enable" and "Chipset SATA Port Enable", under the Chipset tab in the BIOS.
Did you switch PSUs?
I remember this pretty much only because I had to do it once. But there are some HDDs that have issues with the way that PSUs are made a few years back. You'd have to look it up, but basically there is a sense pin or something about three pins in. If there isn't the right voltage there then you won't be able to see the drive.
You can see it here:
I remember this pretty much only because I had to do it once. But there are some HDDs that have issues with the way that PSUs are made a few years back. You'd have to look it up, but basically there is a sense pin or something about three pins in. If there isn't the right voltage there then you won't be able to see the drive.
You can see it here:
Thanks for the offer pal but I've literally just bought one as I'm running out of ideas lol.
So the drives not recognised on the media centre are also not recognised using the caddy connected to another rig. All I'm getting is :
Removable (G
No MediaEven the brand new unformatted is the same
I would assume that would appear unallocated ?!
Anyone got any further ideas ?
I've just checked and yes the old sata connectors had an orange (5 cable) however the new psu cables are also 5 cable but all black?
I did change the psu yes. Interesting video. Is this only for WD though? as I have a seagate that's behaving the same way. It's probably around the same age and isn't new certainly 5 plus years old.
Thanks for the detailed response.
All the drives were retail drives, I've not removed from an extremal hdd drive or anything but this power issue is possibly something however as mentioned in other posts I've got a seagate that's behaving the same way, it's old though so maybe it's also impacted.
As for bios, yeah I read through the manual a day or so ago and had to enable fast boot to see the options, I've now enabled it for all drives but alas it hasn't resolved it.
I've connected all the impacted drives one by one even without the ssd in place and nothing. It's looking like it's a power issue, I've just checked the seagate and it doesn't appear to be spinning up.
However I've just bought a brand new WD blue onky a week ago and this
Apologies, It would appear not now..... It only really became evident when I tried them in the dock as couldn't isolate the noise before
Tbh though I've kinda wasted as much time as I'm prepared to trying to establish the issues now.
I'm more than willing to forget about these old drives but why isn't the 'new' WD I bought spinning up?
Right so here is where I'm at, I'm going to summarize what I've tried as concisely as possible.
3 Drives do not function:
1 x 2Tb Seagate Barracude S/N: (Z1E5GG2E) Model: ST2000DM001 - This drive is old
1 x 2Tb WD Green S/N: WMAWZ0109194 Model: WD20EARX - This drive is also old
1 x 2Tb WD Blue S/N: WCC4M1UUXN5C Model: WD20EZRZ - This drive is NEW
What I've tried:
Booting up on Media centre PC as sole drive
Booting up on Media centre PC with other drives connected
Using different SATA cables, both power and data.
Using Molex to SATA on a different 6 pin from PSU
Docking them in USB 3 dock on a different machine
ADDED - Covering up the 3rd PIN as mentioned in the video, although don't think its relevant as none of the drives were cannibalised from an external USB HDD
ADDED - Run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard on docked drive - Doesn't identify drive at all.
ADDED - Ran CHKDSK on docked drive - Drives come back 'Cannot open volume for direct access.'
What I'm seeing:
Cant do:
None of the drives are spinning up like the Samsung that does work.
None of the drives, old or new are detectable in BIOS on new media centre
None of the drives, old or new are detectable in disk manager on new media centre
None of the drives are discoverable in the dock on the other rig (they appear in the lower half of the disk management window as removable disks with no media)
Drives cant be formatted
Drives cant be initialized
Can do:
I can assign a different drive letter in disk management
What I've read around the 'No Media' seems to indicate and i quote 'The flash memory controller cannot communicate with the NAND flash memory on the drive. Because of this, it appears to the computer as an empty disk drive'
This may be true but 3 failed drives ? Not likely
I'm happy to give it up as a bad job on the Seagate and WD green, its just media, nothing i cant get back and frankly I cba spending any more time looking into it.
The WD Blue however is 'new' and I'm now not sure why this is giving me the same issue ? I've also ordered 2 x 4TB WD Reds that Im now not confident aren't going to give me the same issues.
If Samsung did 4 TB internal HDD's id send the reds back with the blue and just move on but they don't lol
I'm genuinely at a loss guys, don't know where i go from here?!
3 Drives do not function:
1 x 2Tb Seagate Barracude S/N: (Z1E5GG2E) Model: ST2000DM001 - This drive is old
1 x 2Tb WD Green S/N: WMAWZ0109194 Model: WD20EARX - This drive is also old
1 x 2Tb WD Blue S/N: WCC4M1UUXN5C Model: WD20EZRZ - This drive is NEW
What I've tried:
Booting up on Media centre PC as sole drive
Booting up on Media centre PC with other drives connected
Using different SATA cables, both power and data.
Using Molex to SATA on a different 6 pin from PSU
Docking them in USB 3 dock on a different machine
ADDED - Covering up the 3rd PIN as mentioned in the video, although don't think its relevant as none of the drives were cannibalised from an external USB HDD
ADDED - Run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard on docked drive - Doesn't identify drive at all.
ADDED - Ran CHKDSK on docked drive - Drives come back 'Cannot open volume for direct access.'
What I'm seeing:
Cant do:
None of the drives are spinning up like the Samsung that does work.
None of the drives, old or new are detectable in BIOS on new media centre
None of the drives, old or new are detectable in disk manager on new media centre
None of the drives are discoverable in the dock on the other rig (they appear in the lower half of the disk management window as removable disks with no media)
Drives cant be formatted
Drives cant be initialized
Can do:
I can assign a different drive letter in disk management
What I've read around the 'No Media' seems to indicate and i quote 'The flash memory controller cannot communicate with the NAND flash memory on the drive. Because of this, it appears to the computer as an empty disk drive'
This may be true but 3 failed drives ? Not likely
I'm happy to give it up as a bad job on the Seagate and WD green, its just media, nothing i cant get back and frankly I cba spending any more time looking into it.
The WD Blue however is 'new' and I'm now not sure why this is giving me the same issue ? I've also ordered 2 x 4TB WD Reds that Im now not confident aren't going to give me the same issues.
If Samsung did 4 TB internal HDD's id send the reds back with the blue and just move on but they don't lol
I'm genuinely at a loss guys, don't know where i go from here?!
Last edited:
And that's fine but doesn't explain why a new drive doesn't work with new psu and cables
Just because the PSU is new doesn't mean that it follows those standards. Same with the drives. There are quite a few PSUs that are listed over on the "official" thread for this on r/datahorders that mention that even new PSUs don't always follow these standards. I'd see if you can find the specs for your psu and then cross check the list.
I've tried it against 2 different psu.....
Tbh it shouldn't be this difficult. I've bought and installed countless drives over the decades and never ran into this.
All I'm getting from this is Samsung make better more compatible drives lol.
Right first of all cheers for the heads up over on the datahaorders reddit sub, both my media centre PC and and Games rig (the second machine i checked the drives on) appear to have PSUs that are impacted by the whole 3.3v thing (450SFX and RM850 - technically 850 isnt on but the 650 and 750 so assume 850 also) so I can safely say thats 100% the issue.
Looks like a different PSU is in order. Can anyone recommend a small form factor PSU that will work now ?
Thank f**k for that
I probs wont close the thread until I've installed a new psu though just in case lol
and thanks once again.
Okay, let me try and stop you before you waste money on a new PSU. The only drives readily available to end-users where this 3.3V issue occurs are white-label WD Red drives "shucked" from external enclosures. Other than that, this is a datacentre feature that is never, ever implemented on consumer drives or PSUs. The addition to the SATA spec is optional, and is not implemented in consumer-facing product for this exact reason - there's no support for it in any consumer-facing platform. If your drives worked on your previous PSU, they should work on your current PSU. You won't find a PSU supporting this unless you'd effectively need a server SATA backplane, not a new PSU. Each wire on a consumer PSU SATA power cable is linked to three pins in the connector, and these cannot be separated - meaning that getting a separate reading off one of the 15 pins is impossible - that pin is directly linked to two neighboring pins.
On the other hand, if your drives are actually affected by this, the solution is simple: put a piece of tape (ideally Kapton, as it's a good electrical insulator and thermally stable) on the offending pin (but none of the others) on the hard drive power connector (not the power cable!). Done. It's as simple as that.
Now, I don't think this sounds likely. In fact, it sounds extremely unlikely, as
1) two of the drives worked in a previous PC, which is extremely unlikely to have had a PSU with this functionality.
2) a brand new drive also refuses to work
3) they don't work in an external enclosure either, which isn't likely to deliver 3.3V through the SATA connector.
4) You haven't mentioned using shucked drives or refurbished datacentre drives off eBay.
My next question is thus: how have you stored and handled your drives since removing them from the previous PC? Not spinning up speaks to an electronic fault rather than a mechanical one - i.e. something like a defective drive controller or ESD'd PCB. I've never heard of an ESD'd hard drive (heck, ESD-ing anything at all is nigh on impossible these days), but it's a possibility. In theory there could also be some sort of error in the power delivery from the drive controller board to the drive motor, but I've never heard of that happening, and definitely not on three separate drives at once. Still: have they been stored together, or separately? Did they spend time disconnected from any system? If so, where, packaged how, and were they moved around? Did you ever have issues with the power supply in your previous build?
Lastly:
On the other hand, if your drives are actually affected by this, the solution is simple: put a piece of tape (ideally Kapton, as it's a good electrical insulator and thermally stable) on the offending pin (but none of the others) on the hard drive power connector (not the power cable!). Done. It's as simple as that.
Now, I don't think this sounds likely. In fact, it sounds extremely unlikely, as
1) two of the drives worked in a previous PC, which is extremely unlikely to have had a PSU with this functionality.
2) a brand new drive also refuses to work
3) they don't work in an external enclosure either, which isn't likely to deliver 3.3V through the SATA connector.
4) You haven't mentioned using shucked drives or refurbished datacentre drives off eBay.
My next question is thus: how have you stored and handled your drives since removing them from the previous PC? Not spinning up speaks to an electronic fault rather than a mechanical one - i.e. something like a defective drive controller or ESD'd PCB. I've never heard of an ESD'd hard drive (heck, ESD-ing anything at all is nigh on impossible these days), but it's a possibility. In theory there could also be some sort of error in the power delivery from the drive controller board to the drive motor, but I've never heard of that happening, and definitely not on three separate drives at once. Still: have they been stored together, or separately? Did they spend time disconnected from any system? If so, where, packaged how, and were they moved around? Did you ever have issues with the power supply in your previous build?
Lastly:
This isn't relevant, as it clearly pertains to SSDs (and possibly memory cards and similar flash-based products) and not HDDs. There's no NAND flash in a HDD (unless it's a hybrid drive), and no NAND controller. The 'No media' error simply means that nothing is detected as connected to your storage interface, and you got the results you got because memory card readers are (by far) the most common swappable external storage interfaces.
FFS lol
The drives have been placed on the worktop after taking out. They haven't been dropped or misshandled.
If this psu issue isn't a thing then why specifically do the psus in question appear on the list of those psus not working?
Also the drives don't spin up on the media centre or on my gaming rig with a caddy attached
Again is this coincidence ?
I defo welcome your lengthy post though but I'm just going round and round.
I've ordered some Kapton tape though so I'll try that
Can't belive ghetto fixing is the solution lol
Kapton tape is nice (and useful for other stuff, so no need to cancel your order), but for a quick and dirty test, just use whatever scotch tape or similar you have lying around. All you're looking for is confirmation if the drive spins up or not.
As for this not being a PSU issue - it's possible that there are PSUs that use modded SATA power connectors where this pin isn't present to avoid this issue, but given that this is an optional and IRL enterprise-only feature of the SATA spec, the vast majority of PSUs will not support drives like this. Your PSUs being on a "not supported" list is down to nothing more complex than them being regular off-the-shelf consumer PSUs, alongside the vast majority of PSUs out there. I would guess there are some PSUs targeted at professional workstation users and similar high-performance computing that might account for this possibility (as those users might come across a datacentre drive once in a blue moon), but other than that, I wouldn't expect PSU manufacturers to bother to source asymmetrical SATA crimp pins to avoid an issue 99.999999% of their PSUs will never encounter.
