WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB internal HDD seen as only 280GB

Today I have installed a brand new WD Caviar Green 2.5 TB internal HDD on my computer assuming that it will help me to increase the storage capacity but the Windows sees it as only 280 Tb HDD. Does anyone know how?

You didn’t provide any information about your computer yet. So without the PC info it is quite difficult to provide a solution. For example, it was with the Intel AHCI driver (Intel Storage Manager Driver or current Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver) in the older versions compatibility problems with drives that exceed the 2 TB limit. For example, 3 TB drives were detected only as 750 GB. There are no problems with current version.

On which ports you have connected your RAID ports to which your hard drives (both the color / name)?

Have you set the BIOS / UEFI both the Marvell controller and the Intel Controller to AHCI or RAID?

Only motherboards with the current generation of UEFI BIOS or compatible versions can deal with larger 2.2TB HDDs. And some of the previous generation of motherboards (P55, P55, etc) if the manufacturer has adjusted the bios in the direction. I myself have an MSI with P55 chipset. Came there with one of the last BIOS versions, the function * HDD larger than 2.2TB * added support. So If you want to use the HDD as a Windows system hard drive, your BIOS must be able to handle it.

Did you check into the compatibility list of the controller?

What version of OS are you using?

As far as I know that HDDs which are larger than 2T need to be formatted GPT instead of MRB if you are using them on Windows OS. However I have doubt about whether Windows XP 32 bit will recognize drives larger than 2T or not.

If you do it through an enclosure + internal disk, it may not support hard disks larger than 2TB... What do the BIOS tell? Did you check in the Windows Disk management? Did you try creating a new volume? If there is any space left, then it might be possible to create a new partition for your HDD.

If you have lots of RAM, turn off the paging file on the SSD, or else you are doing the very fast break / slow / fix-and-ready. Otherwise, while the SSD is faster, but the hard disk holds much more write cycles in this regard of. Furthermore, if the SSD 200MB / s reading society, But you are working on it, Windows is doing it anyway constantly, and can be changed even while a swap file (s) hurry, just as 100MB / s, since only one is writing or to read, so that every average drive of 125 + MB / s faster. If you do not have SSD 200MB / s write community, you will not really notice a difference. Try something like HDTune.

This is because the BIOS can a no longer address larger 2TB hard drives. It can only address up to 2TB hard drives, and then it's over. More is not there. So either use a motherboard with UEFI or an external hard drive enclosure has its own controller or the hard drive to give back or whatever.

I believe that this issue can be fixed by a BIOS update. Usually due to the older version BIOS some controllers could not able to recognize newer drives properly. The latest version of BIOS might have fix for that. Other than this most manufacturers offer this convenient tool to where you can perform the update from within Windows. This is the only thing you have to do then maybe the time of re-make.