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I work at a very small company (8 people) and was given the task to add an HDD to our server to do incremental backups. We bought a new 8TB IronWolf HDD but after installation the server computer can only recognise about 1.3TB. I am not at all experienced with such systems, so I hope you guys can help.

The steps I took:

  1. Plugged in HDD into SATA slot 5. There are two main identical hard drives in RAID formation in slots 1 and 2.
  2. In Disc Manager I initialized the disc (in GPT format). At this step, the wizard told me the maximum partition size was about 1.3TB.
  3. Formatted the drive and assigned a Drive Letter.

I have found a few forums having the same kind of issue (1.3TB reading instead of 8TB). These concluded that:

  • I should repartition the HDD. This will not work as the Disc Manager does not see 8TB.
  • Update the Intel RST driver.
  • Change the SATA cable to another SATA port.

Some details:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Mobo: Supermicro X9SCL
  • BIOS Version: American Megatrends Inc. 2.0b, 9/17/2012

As this is the only server computer I want to limit the restarting of this PC (preferably not restarting at all).

My questions:

  • Could it be caused by an outdated BIOS?
  • Could the existing RAID configuration interfere with this HDD?
  • Could it be an issue with the HDD?
  • Can updating the Intel RST driver interfere with the current RAID configuration?

I hope you guys can help! And thanks!

Hein Wessels
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2 Answers2

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Can't comment with <50 rep...

Has it ever shown 8TB? Have you dried it in a different machine?

Looking at the drive specs, it's built from 1.3TB platters is seems. There is a chance of it being DOA - be it faulty platters or read head.

One way of testing it would be moving it to a different machine and checking if it behaves the same way.

UnS3eN
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If you don’t see a block of unallocated space then your drive is faulty.

Before submitting an RMA ensure that your raid card firmware is completely up to date, have enough power (I.e your server PSU is powerful enough to support all your hardware) etc as they’ll make you jump through them hoops before they actually do anything anyway

Timothy Frew
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  • I’m not sure you understood my suggestion. CAN you try putting it in other machine to see if it behaves differently? Also check disk manager within windows and see if it recognises part of the drive as unallocated? You may have just formatted the drive wrong – Timothy Frew May 02 '18 at 06:30