how to use terabyte hard drives

[*inhales*Boi]

this may be an odd place to ask this but i have 2 3 terabyte harddrives and my computer only detects about 750 GB. does anyone know how i can get the full storage amount out of them?

 

[Meaning Less]

Open the disk management tool from windows (win+x > disk management).
It will show you how much free space is left, you could either create multiple partitions with it or delete everything and format the entire drive into a single one.

 

[*inhales*Boi]

disk management is what is showing 750 GB. i havent made a partition yet since thats not enough space

 

[rayminator]

brand new or old?
where did you get them from?
are you sure they are terabyte and not gigabytes?

there are scams going around that if you just bought them

 

[*inhales*Boi]

brand new or old?

i think their old but not, like, ancient

where did you get them from?

a recycled server from a company that shut down

are you sure they are terabyte and not gigabytes?

yes, its label clearly says 3TB as its capacity

 

[Meaning Less]

Well, google says to try

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, sounds like a known issue with some 3tb drives.

Spoiler: Steps

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[*inhales*Boi]

i came here after that link wasnt able to help me :/

 

[Pamphlet]

a recycled server from a company that shut down

There's a fair chance that they were parts of

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arrays. You may need to

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.

 

[*inhales*Boi]

thank you for your suggestion but the link doesnt tell me much, the only times "table" is mention in the link is for 'convert', 'gpt', and 'uniqueid'
the harddrive im trying to get use out of is disk_2 in the diskpart command interpreter and 'convert disk_2', 'gpt disk_2', and 'uniqueid disk_2' dont seem to do anything?

 

[Pamphlet]

You'll be wanting to use the select command to choose the drive you want to work on and use the clean command. It'll be something like this:

diskpart
list disk
select disk 2 (or whichever drive number matches)
clean
exit

You could also create your new partition in diskpart but it's a bit friendlier to hit the search button then type diskmgmt and do that in the GUI where the drive should now show as an uninitialised disk.

 

[*inhales*Boi]

ok i followed along and my partition wizard shows the disk still at 750ish GB but its also MBR so ill convert it to GPT now

aaand 750ish GB still unfortunatly

 

[Pamphlet]

Hmm. Any chance of posting the model number of the HDD?

 

[*inhales*Boi]

sure, i believe its: "HUS724030ALA640"

 

[rayminator]

it seems the drive is formatted into MBR that will show less space try to convert it into GPT

how some info on how to convert it

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but I wonder if the driver firmware was changed in some way so it will work in the server it was in?

after converting it to GPT format the drive

but take a look where the connector are located at some drive still have them called jumpers for master, slave... can't remember the last two if the something there pull it out

it would look something like this

 

[anne O'nymous]

sure, i believe its: "HUS724030ALA640"

SATA compatibility ?

Also, I guess that you would have said it if disk manager was showing it as having a an invalid partition, but personally the first thing I would have done if I had to use computer coming from an external source, especially a server, would have been to start a deep formatting. Not by fear regarding what's on the drive, but because while Disk Manager obviously ask directly the hardware about it's size, it also rely on the information it will found on a the drive allocation table.
Between the RAID implementations that tend to be proprietaries, the admins who freak out and use their own drive manager with a tweaked version of whatever file system, and sometimes even the OSes installed in the server, there's a tons of possibilities for the disk manager to simply not correctly recognize the hard drive. Something that a deep formatting would solve, since it would restore a fully valid and supported allocation table.

 

[*inhales*Boi]

low level formatting took a while but unfortunately hasnt really done anything. i had a popup saying the drive needed to be initialized and i chose GPT but the system still says there is only 750ishGB

and for the image rayminator sent my drive doesnt have most of those connections. the right side is all barren plastic and the left side is the same as the picture
no sign of a 'hard drive jumper' area at all

 

[toolkitxx]

i think you have to check this part of your disc: ' To ensure the utmost in data safety and security, the Ultrastar 7K4000 is also available with a bulk data encryption (BDE) option. When enabled, the Hitachi BDE implementation encrypts all data on the drive using a private security key as it is written to the disk, and then decrypts it with the key as it is retrieved, giving users an extreme level of data protection. Unlike softwarebased encryption solutions, the Hitachi BDE implementation is hardware-based, so it doesn’t slow the system down. This technology also speeds up and simplifies the drive re-deployment and decommissioning process. By deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby eliminating the need for time-consuming, multi-pattern data overwrite '

Since it was part of a company chances are very high that you deal with encrypted data on that drive thus reducing what software sees as capacity.

 

[Pamphlet]

Nah, that shouldn't have any effect on capacity. All it does is render existing data junk when the private key is cleared.

There's a possibility something is going awry with formatting. It might be worth trying with sector size set to 512 bytes and 4096 bytes to see if there is any difference. There's also a very slim chance there might be a relevant motherboard BIOS update.

By this point, if I had the drive in my own hands, I'd be booting something like

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to rule out the possibility of Windows foibles. If that still didn't help the next thing to try would be testing the drive in another machine.

 

[Meaning Less]

Have you checked all possible reasons listed in the link I posted? It also mentions that old versions of Intel's rapid storage won't support drives over 2tb. It could be a lot of things.

 

[toolkitxx]

Nah, that shouldn't have any effect on capacity. All it does is render existing data junk when the private key is cleared.

There's a possibility something is going awry with formatting. It might be worth trying with sector size set to 512 bytes and 4096 bytes to see if there is any difference. There's also a very slim chance there might be a relevant motherboard BIOS update.

By this point, if I had the drive in my own hands, I'd be booting something like

You must be registered to see the links

to rule out the possibility of Windows foibles. If that still didn't help the next thing to try would be testing the drive in another machine.

I quote how this works again - '
If a Hitachi
drive with encryption is used, then simply erasing the key
that serves as the basis for the encryption can instantly
render all the data on the disk unrecognizable '
Not unreadable but unrecognizable. This is hardware encryption and not software encryption.

But aside from that - there is an

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of that disc. So there is a good chance it is a wrongly labelled one