Help with new 5TB drive

needslipo · Jun 13, 2014

So I recently scooped up a new 5TB Seagate (USB) to add to my computer.
I tested the drive out of the box and it worked fine, so then i opened up the enclosure and put the drive in my computer via SATA. When I boot up, windows hangs at the windows logo/loading circle of dots.
If I boot without the drive and then hot plug it in, the drive does show up in device manager, but not in disk manager or any partition/hdd utility.
So then I tried gparted on Hiren's Boot CD - again if i boot gparted with the drive plugged in, it takes forever to boot and then doesn't show the drive. If I hot plug in the drive after booting gparted, I can see and access the drive. I wiped the drive, put on a gpt partition table and ntfs partition and rebooted -
Even after all that, windows still hangs when booting with the drive plugged in, and wont show the drive outside of device manager when hot plugged.

I tried the drive in my other desktop and had the same issues, tried different SATA cables and ports..

Some specs - Windows 8.1 64-bit, motherboard: ASUS P6X58D Premium, Seagate is model ST5000DM000, plugged into the intel SATA ports.
Latest drivers and bios, 3tb drives work fine.

Again the drive works great via USB, just not via SATA.

Any help would be appreciated.

Eddie Obscurant · Jun 15, 2014

Probably, the intel rst orom can't recognize the actual size of the disk. Did you try connecting the disk on the grey sata ports (marvell) ?

Of course on both cases make sure that when you connect the 5tb disk, the disk boot order doesn't change in bios. In my case with ich10r even though my intel orom was detecting my 3tb disk as 768gb, I didn't have any problem with booting unless of course i was trying to boot from that disk.

AvatarOfWoe666 · Jun 15, 2014

I recently got a 4 TB seagate for my pc and it would not show up for use without using Seagates discwizard software. I do not know if the thing you were trying to use does the same thing as their program but it is a small download and would be pretty quick to try.
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/beyond-2tb/

bfasan · Sep 5, 2014

I'M HAVING THE SAME PROBLEM WITH A Seagate 5TB drive. I've ordered a pci-e sata raid controller hoping that might help. If it does I'll msg you back.

Quote:

Originally Posted by needslipo

So I recently scooped up a new 5TB Seagate (USB) to add to my computer.
I tested the drive out of the box and it worked fine, so then i opened up the enclosure and put the drive in my computer via SATA. When I boot up, windows hangs at the windows logo/loading circle of dots.
If I boot without the drive and then hot plug it in, the drive does show up in device manager, but not in disk manager or any partition/hdd utility.
So then I tried gparted on Hiren's Boot CD - again if i boot gparted with the drive plugged in, it takes forever to boot and then doesn't show the drive. If I hot plug in the drive after booting gparted, I can see and access the drive. I wiped the drive, put on a gpt partition table and ntfs partition and rebooted -
Even after all that, windows still hangs when booting with the drive plugged in, and wont show the drive outside of device manager when hot plugged.

I tried the drive in my other desktop and had the same issues, tried different SATA cables and ports..

Some specs - Windows 8.1 64-bit, motherboard: ASUS P6X58D Premium, Seagate is model ST5000DM000, plugged into the intel SATA ports.
Latest drivers and bios, 3tb drives work fine.

Again the drive works great via USB, just not via SATA.

Any help would be appreciated.

mostyello · Sep 11, 2014

Quote:

So I recently scooped up a new 5TB Seagate (USB) to add to my computer.
I tested the drive out of the box and it worked fine, so then i opened up the enclosure and put the drive in my computer via SATA. When I boot up, windows hangs at the windows logo/loading circle of dots.

I have an almost identical setup, except my ASUS MOBO is model Sabertooth Z77. Previously had 2 of the 3TB Seagate hard drives and there were no problems. I bought a 5TB to replace one for more storage and immediately had the same problem you are having. So I tried it in my brothers computer and it worked perfectly. I put this 5TB in an external enclosure and it worked perfectly. So I tried putting it back inside my case with several different cables and all ports except the Intel SATA ports initially based on the recommendation in the manual to use the white ports for data drives. None of those ports worked and I called Seagate. They couldn't come up with any new troubleshooting ideas so I gave up until the next day. Finally decided to try it on the Intel SATA port (brown). Not sure why this made a difference or if it was the only thing that fixed it but now I can see it in my BIOS and in Windows.

However, now I am trying to re-install Windows 8.1 from USB in order to take advantage of the UEFI boot. The tricky part is setting up the BIOS correctly. This was no big deal before having the 5TB installed, but now the same settings seem to break something in the BIOS. Meaning once I select the UEFI USB device from the boot menu it will just hang like you explained with the circling dots. I feel confident that this isn't a Seagate hard drive problem but more likely a ASUS MOBO problem. I'm trying to install to an SSD, so I disconnected my 5TB in order to get the Windows install to work, then I plan to reconnect the 5TB (while powered down) once the install is completed.

The whole thing is really pissing me off.

I think ASUS needs a new BIOS to address this problem. Doubtful that will happen, but maybe someone will provide a better solution.

If you have any questions about my BIOS setup or whatever just let me know.
Quote:

I recently got a 4 TB seagate for my pc and it would not show up for use without using Seagates discwizard software. I do not know if the thing you were trying to use does the same thing as their program but it is a small download and would be pretty quick to try.

Unfortunately this won't solve his problem. I tried this solution and it only will work if the HDD shows up in the Disk Management. I'm willing to bet that his 5TB doesn't even show up in his BIOS after getting the circling dots of death, let alone seeing in Disk Management. It's a good suggestion but won't work in this situation because the software won't even see the hard drive and therefore won't be able to do anything with it.

bfasan · Sep 11, 2014

I just bought a high-point rocket-raid pci-e sata controller. The 640L, it was approx 100$. PROBLEM SOLVED!!!

I now have a 10.0TB raid0 using 2x 5TB Seagate disks. Thus far working great.

And as I mentioned in my previous post that for some reason only 1 of the 5tb would ever show up in Windows and most the time when they were plugged in to my Z87 deluxe dual Asus boards sata ports Windows8 would freeze at the spinning dots of death.

I'm super happy with the 640L fixing my problems, although I would have rathered if Asus fixed this with a bios update.

bfasan · Sep 11, 2014

I plan to do some speed benchmarking with this 640L setup. Apparently I can add a ssd as a cache drive, even with the drives being in raid 0 or 5. Should be sweet if it works

Sergey1415 · Sep 19, 2014

Quote:

Originally Posted by bfasan

I just bought a high-point rocket-raid pci-e sata controller. The 640L, it was approx 100$. PROBLEM SOLVED!!!

After reading your message, I bought HighPoint Rocket 620A, and my analogic proplem unfortunately was not be solved(

phzi · Sep 21, 2014

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sergey1415

After reading your message, I bought HighPoint Rocket 620A, and my analogic proplem unfortunately was not be solved(

The 620A uses a 88SE9128 controller, whereas the 640L uses the newer Marvell 88SE9230 controller. Sounds like only the newer marvell controller can work with these drive's crippled firmware, maybe?

I'm running into an identical issue as the OP with these seagate drives (ST5000DM000 pulled from external cases) on my Asus Z87-A motherboard. Drives are detected fine in BIOS, including disk size, but then windows gets stuck at the boot logo. If you wait several hours, windows will eventually boot and the drives are viewable in device manager, but disk management can't do anything with them. If I plug them into an old PCI SATA controller (FastTrak TX2300), it recognizes the drives after throwing an error at boot "There is a problem with your hardware!", but only shows the first 582.19GB.

Any other solutions for this issue? I notice these drives are being sold as bare now, and the firmware revision marked on the drive is identical (CC41) - some way to dump the firmware off a bare drive and flash to these?

I was going to buy a 640L after reading the success story above, but Sergey1415 has me slightly concerned that this success will not be reproducible =/.

ChristineBCW · Sep 23, 2014

Boot partitions are typically limited to 2Tb or less. These greater-than-2Tb drives are meant as secondary drives, not as boot drives.

phzi · Oct 11, 2014

ChristineBCW, that is totally irrelevent to the OP's issue... Windows won't boot if these drives are plugged in, period. Nothing to do with boot drives.

For that matter too, you are incorrect, and >2TB drives work just fine as boot drives if you are using UEFI.

XS850SG · Nov 19, 2014

Ok, So I'm playing with the 5TB drive too. I'm using mine as a secondary data drive, so I have no issues with booting. However, once removed from the enclosure and put on a SATA III 6gb/s controller (Marvel- Gigabyte Z77 board), I had to make it a GPT disk in order to use it all as one partition (4657.53GB usable).

Then I started transfering files and the speed was all over the place- from 3mb/s to over 200mb/s. After doing some reading online I find that Seagate crippled the firmware somehow? Still not sure how that could possibly work.

After resigning myself to putting it back in it's USB 3.0 Enclosure (where a 2.5GB transfer takes 4 hours instead of 2 days), Windows sees the drive as a GPT Protective Partition in disk manager and won't let me do anything with it.

Very frustrated with the Seagate. I'm now looking for a storage drive made by anybody but Seagate.

phzi · Nov 19, 2014

I got a highpoint rocketraid 640L (not the rocket 640L), and my 2 drives are working great on it. Performance in raid0 is great too - they actually outperform my SSDs for long writes, and the drives run very cool.

XS850SG · Nov 20, 2014

phzi- do you have yours set as one single partition of 5TB or broken into smaller partitions?

phzi · Nov 20, 2014

Quote:

Originally Posted by XS850SG

phzi- do you have yours set as one single partition of 5TB or broken into smaller partitions?

I have 2 of these drives, and I am using them with a single 10TB partition.

XS850SG · Nov 20, 2014

And both of your drives are ST5000DM000? And they surpass SSD speeds? I'm having the exact opposite experience with mine- it's slower than any drive I've owned in the last decade.

Josh Lyman · Nov 26, 2014

Assuming you guys are talking about the 2014 Backup Plus with the blue bottom, how did you open up the enclosure? All the guides I see online are for the old GoFlex version that had the removable USB adapter.

Chris13002 · Nov 26, 2014

*disregard, someone already asked after reading again. derp.

vacaloca · Dec 25, 2014

I came across this issue today while replacing a 4TB Barracuda XT ST400DX000 (P/N: 1CL160-570) HDD with a ST5000DM000-1FK178 5TB HDD. Windows 8.1 x64 would sit spinning on the boot menu with the 5TB drive connected to any of the SATA ports on my ASUS RAMPAGE IV EXTREME motherboard. I had not installed Intel's Rapid Storage Technology driver, so I did that... for my system, the latest 13.2.4.1000 driver executable mentioned invalid platform, so I tried the older 12.9.0.1001 version dated 12/12/2013, which installed fine.

The HDD controller on this motherboard is an Intel(R) C600 Series Chipset SATA AHCI Controller, FWIW.

Once Intel's RST was installed, I rebooted to make sure everything was in order. Then I shut down the PC, reconnected the 5TB drive, and it booted just fine on Windows 8.1 64-bit. Hopefully this helps some of you with the same issue.

Also, FWIW, the drive was recognized in my BIOS just fine and a live USB of Ubuntu 14.10 was able to create a 4.54 TB NTFS volume on the drive just fine... so it seems that Microsoft's default driver was just too old to handle large drives.

gringott · Dec 25, 2014

I bought two 5TB USB 3 Seagate drives the other day with the intent of adding them to my drive pool on Windows 7
They are the Expansion model with ST5000DM000 drives inside, firmware CC41.
My MB is a Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD7 and OS is W7 x64. Controller is the onboard Marvell 88SE9172 SATA 6Gps.

After popping them out of the case this morning, I did a quick web search to see if there was newer firmware, and this thread came up.
After reading it, I thought, what the heck? So I popped one in a drive sled and plugged it into my HAF-XB case.
Immediately, Windows popped up a dialog box telling me I have to format this drive to use it.
I canceled that and opened Disk Manager.
The drive shows up as a Basic disk, 4657.53 GB, three partitions, 1 x 582.19 GB RAW; 1 x 1465.81 GB Unallocated; 1 x 2609.53 GB Unallocated.
As far as I know to have a close to 5 TB partition you have to use GPT. Therefore, I had to convert the disk to GPT. To do this, I first deleted the 1st RAW partition. This allows the disk to be converted; the option was ghosted until I did so.
Converting to GPT deleted the remaining 2 unallocated partitions and made 1 x 4657.40 Unallocated partition.
I then made a "New Simple Volume", used all space to create a NTFS partition and BANG!

I have a new volume available to add to my CoverCube DrivePool of 4657.40 GB.

No issues and no worries.

gringott · Dec 25, 2014

I just did a test of speed on this newly installed drive before adding it to the drivepool.

I copied a 4.67GB file to the drive 10 times.
The average time to copy the file was 12.84 seconds.
The average speed was 354 Mps.
The speed figure came from Directory Opus copy function dialog box.
The time came from a digital stop watch.
I copied the file from an SSD on a separate onboard controller using the same Marvel chip.

gringott · Dec 25, 2014

BTW, adding these two drives will bring my "local" to this PC CoverCube DrivePool to 38.64 TB.
I also have an archive server using the same software that currently has two DrivePools, one at 14.6 TB, one at 39.2 TB for a grand total of 92.44 TB!

This does not include local storage, this is just the "pooled" storage, a new record for me. I have 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and now 5TB drives in the pools.

gshearer · Apr 4, 2015

I have 5 of these drives. Firmware varies form CC44 to CC47. They definitely have issues being used outside of their USB enclosure.

I have tried these drives with Intel, Marvell, Silicon Image, and JMB SATA controllers, usually with the same results.

What I have discovered... is that you have to slow down writes to them. Reads never seem to be a problem, in fact, the drives perform admirably when serving up data.

Writes, however, if you've got a fast file system they seem to produce random AHCI errors under long duration writes (such as moving lots of data to them at one time).

DO NOT TRUST these drives with data. I'm using them for movie / media storage, which is mostly "write once" data.

Hate you Seagate. I will not purchase any more of your ****. I've hated you for years. I thought I would give them another try since these drives were so cheap ($119 on black friday so I bought 5 of them). I am thinking about ebaying the whole bunch.

-G

mechtech · Apr 4, 2015

Quote:

Originally Posted by gshearer

I have 5 of these drives. Firmware varies form CC44 to CC47. They definitely have issues being used outside of their USB enclosure.

I have tried these drives with Intel, Marvell, Silicon Image, and JMB SATA controllers, usually with the same results.

What I have discovered... is that you have to slow down writes to them. Reads never seem to be a problem, in fact, the drives perform admirably when serving up data.

Writes, however, if you've got a fast file system they seem to produce random AHCI errors under long duration writes (such as moving lots of data to them at one time).

DO NOT TRUST these drives with data. I'm using them for movie / media storage, which is mostly "write once" data.

Hate you Seagate. I will not purchase any more of your ****. I've hated you for years. I thought I would give them another try since these drives were so cheap ($119 on black friday so I bought 5 of them). I am thinking about ebaying the whole bunch.

-G

If the drives are giving you errors, sell them now while it's still painless to do so.

I speak as someone who is doing data recovery on a busted Seagate drive right now...

gshearer · Apr 4, 2015

I agree, but I'm not putting important data on these drives mostly movies / videos. Easily re-acquired.

I'm using rsync under Linux, limiting bandwidth writes to 20MBytes/sec seems to do the trick.

These drives spend the rest of their lives not even spinning, and mounted read-only. They only spin up when someone wants to watch a movie in the house or something, so again I dont trust them with important stuff.

But I see one more damn AHCI erorr they're going the hell on ebay.

HATE YOU SEAGATE. My first hard drive was an ST-238R (RLL) 30 megabyte drive AND IT WAS **** TOO! I haven't learned in 20 years.

Grrrr

gshearer · Apr 5, 2015

I stumbled onto something. First off, understand I'm using Linux and as such I have many different file systems to choose from, but I have only tried ext4 which is sort of the standard/default for most linux distros.

Anyway, I have tried EVERYTHING I can think of to make these drives work. Here's a summary:

Problem: Weird AHCI / SATA errors during periods of sustained write (such as copying several BIG (multi-gig) files TO one of these drives). Note that READS seem to work without issue.

Scenarios:

1. Various SATA chipsets (using various motherboards and also cards) Intel 8 Series/C220, Intel 7 Series/C210, ASmedia 1062, Silicon Image SiI 3114, various Marvell, JMB

2. Various / brand new SATA cables

3. Slow writes (reducing write speed from full to, say, 20%)

4. Linux queueing disciplines: noop, deadline, ncq

None completely prevent the issue. Although, slow writes extended period between the failures, but ultimately, still failed.

For the heck of it, I tried NTFS... not a single error at all so far. I have been blasting on the drives for the last 6 hours or so, not a single problem. In all scenarios above, the problem would manifest within 30 minutes each try.

SO.... one must summize that the firmware in these drives isn't necessarily crippled, but hard-coded to work with NTFS "flavored" block/sector write sizes (or something). I would not trust these drives in a RAID scenario. Those of you who are using hardware raid or NAS devices successfully may have just gotten lucky that those systems are using whatever block sizes this drive's firmware likes. (or whatever it is that it likes)

Help with new 5TB drive

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