Installing new HD - confused!

cymruchris

cymruchris

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Chris
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I had a recent thread where I mentioned I'm changing a dying hard drive - the new drive arrived yesterday morning.

The existing hard drive is a Western Digital 2tb.

The replacement drive for my files is a Seagate 3tb - sourced from Amazon (real Amazon - not a reseller).

When I connect the drive from the box - it rightly isn't set up and allocated - so I go to disc management - but instead of finding the 3tb disc that I'm expecting, I get 746gb?

Then when I run the Seagate disc wizard software - it tells me that I have 746gb unallocated - but also seems to appear to tell me that I have a Dynamic volume of 746gb as well?

Even if that's the case - it doesn't add up to anywhere near 3tb..

Am I missing something really obvious here? Why am I not seeing 3tb?

harddrive1.jpg


hard-drive-2.jpg
 
Sounds like a disk controller issue. Drop "3tb shows as 746Gb" into google and you get loads of hits...
 
There is an issue with drives over 2tb and BIOS. Similar to 32bit and 4gb RAM. BIOSs are going to change over the next few years to uefi or something. Newish machines should be able to use 3tb drives as data drives, but not primary. I spent a weekend finding out information on this when I ordered 4 x 3tb drives to set up in an array, had to drop to 2tb drives.

How old is the computer?
 
Beginning to realise that installing this HD isn't as easy as expected!!

Seems like a very common problem..
 
Only for modern and very large drives on older bios systems.

This is why many prefer to use large capacity drives externally via ethernet or thunderbolt.
 
Finally resolved. Following something going wrong on a BIOS update and constant blue screening.. I decided to try and format my other smaller drive, and then access the old drive as a slave. This worked. I then used Seagates latest Discwizard software that has allowed me to create a virtual volume. My Pc can now see all 3tb, albeit in 2 partitions.

If I'd realised that a 3tb drive would have been so much hassle - I'd have stuck with a 2tb x 2 or something similar.

So a warning to anyone considering a 3tb drive - it might not be as easy an upgrade as you might think. Think carefully before going down this route!

I've recovered almost everything from the old drive. Most programmes are back up and running (although I couldn't find my PS 5.5 disc and serial number for a while which was scary).

The last thing to try and recover now are the email files from Outlook on the old drive and import them somehow into the new install. But it's late. I'm tired. I'll leave that for next time!

Thanks to all for your advice and pointers on both of my threads.
 
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