3TB Internal WD Hard Drive recognized as 746GB

[servan$]

I have searched everywhere else regarding this issue and there are some people reported about the same incident. Usually I have seen posts where people saying that 3tb drives only recognized as 2.2tb but in my case, the entire problem is bit different. Currently I am using the 3TB internal Caviar Green drive but it is mounted on the external USB enclosure but the Windows recognize it as 746.39gb. it is terribly strange and don’t know why? The motherboard is Gigabyte P55-UD4P Rev1 and Windows 7 64bit.

[HKrish]

It may be that there are problems between DS - controller - are hard. Because usually, the DS has no internal problems with 3TB hard drives. Externally is to stop the problem with the USB controller on the external casing.

[Izna]

If you have Windows Vista / 7, find the icon “My Computer" and right click "Computer" and choose Manage". In the window, find "Storage -> Disk Management" and click on it. It will scan your drives and displays the list of disks you have installed on your system. Find the WD drive in the list, select it and you'll see at the bottom is selected in the graphical partition. On this partition graph, click the right mouse button and select "Format". Choose NTFS and reformat. If you can choose the format option, you will probably have to first create the NTFS partition with the option that appears. The MBR is the "Master Boot Record", the boot sector of hard disk typical of Windows systems. The GPT partition format is a 64-bit system, which does not quite know what it paints in your case (it should be NTFS and GPT).

[AkshatShetty]

I have seen that the firmware of older external enclosures is limited to 32-bit LBAs. So this indicates that it can only address the capacity up to 2TiB, which corresponds to a maximum LBA of 0xFFFFFFFF. The USB-SATA bridge processor which is installed for the enclosure fetch the drive's capacity by issuing an ATA Identify Device command. The drive then responds with a data block. It is a 512-byte data block which may contain model number, serial number, and capacity. Now Total LBA is 48-bit value but the bridge firmware is limited to 32-bits.

[FullTimepass]

The problem is that not all SATA controllers of motherboards recognize 3TB hard drives. Theirs should be using a controller by using the PCI Xpress 3TB of Disk 3TB. This controller card that came with the WD 3TB might be faulty. So try with another one and see this time you will notice exact amount.

[CRiley]

The partitioning has no effect on how the disk is actually recognized by the system. The problem cannot be solved with software. You can create a larger file system on the hard drive (e.g. internally or they connect and format to 3TB), mounted in an external case, the file system is of course still believe to be 3TB in size and are displayed as such. This does not change the fact that you then get read / write errors when actually trying to access the system recognizes the 746GB. The hard drive is simply not available in the housing at full capacity.

[Jokull]

This same thing has happened to me, and not easily solved problem of the plate or the controller but the driver software is not updated and therefore you only recognize up to 2TB. In order to fix it, you need to connect your computer to the internet and after that go to MY computer> right-click mouse - properties> in the upper left - Device Manager> ATA controllers> right click - update software on each SATA or IDE devices to appear.

[Rawana]

Older SATA controllers can often bypass max. 2 TB (because of hardware limitation, nothing brings a driver update). For larger boards, it comes more problems. If you have the option not to operate the card at the on-board controller, I would try. In my old Asus P5BDeluxe board on Intel Controller have the 3TB drives will not work (were indeed recognized as 3TB, but if writes are done on areas after the first 2 TB, was the partition table is destroyed), the on-board JMircon controller ran the 3 TB drives. Those who have already begun to play out data should immediately cease to describe it and save the data. Because the built-in controller can only address 2.2 TB, that appeals to you as soon as a sector above the threshold, the data is written to a wrong (otherwise been assigned) sector.