Hard Drive Not Showing Full Capacity Windows 7
3 Causes for Hard Drive Not Showing Full CapacityIs your hard drive corrupted when it shows the wrong capacity? There are quite a few reasons that would lead to a hard drive showing less space than it is advertised. For example, a newly bought 500 GB HDD displays only 465 GB even with no data on it. Or, some external hard disks and USB flash drives may develop another incorrect capacity issue that the free space size is hugely decreased.This is the real story of a user telling his 1TB hard drive now showing only 0.18TB of free space.' My WD external hard drive gets a strange problem. It's 1TB advertised and I only use it as a backup hard drive. But today I surprisingly found that the free space is only 0.18TB.
Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST) console clearly identifies the Hitachi 3TB drive (showing 2.861TB above due to the way hard drive capacity is measured in industry marketing versus in operating system terms.) On the other hand, Windows Disk Management sees the disk (Disk 0 in the above) as a 746GB drive.
That's impossible because the used space can't be more than 200GB. What happened? Why is the hard drive showing wrong free space? Can I restore the full size even so?'
I'll warn you. I've got a Gigabyte motherboard and I'm running Windows 7 64 bit and I've gigantic stability issues with my two 2 TB Seagate drives.
I can only imagine the 'fun' you're going to have with a 3 TB drive. When I say 'stability issues' what I mean is that my drives simply vanish from a working system. My boot drive is a 256 GB SSD.
That works without any problems. But I use the 2 TB drives as scratch space and during large write operations the disk being written to will vanish. This causes crashes, freezes, etc. Not good.I've had some suggestions that partitioning my drives into 1 TB or smaller chunks MAY provide added stability, but I have not tried that yet. I think you are right that Windows should see the drive as a 3 GB drive. Maybe you need to play with BIOS settings to get the drive fully seen. I had to use the AHCI setting in my BIOS.
Until I did that I couldn't even get the drives to be seen at all. I haven't had any problems with large drives on my Gigabyte MBs. I'm running a couple of 2TB (Samsung) drives over eSATA on the PC in my computer details and I have several more 1.5TB drives on other GB PCs, though it may be a issue with certain MBs. But I do run most of them in AHCI mode.I would repartition and reformat the drive from Disk Manager and see if it fixes the issue. If not, check with Asus. You might find a user forum on their site that could give you more information.But it may just as likely be a problem with the drive itself. I assume you have also installed the latest HDD MB drivers from Asus?
Updating BIOS is usually not necessary unless it addresses a particular problem you have.Also, if you aren't using AHCI already on your PC, you would have to change that in BIOS and you may have to make a registry change to get it to work. AHCI is easier to install when you install the OS. I appreciate your comments, deadrats. Believe it or not this is actually my first home PC with SATA anything on it and I have to admit that in hindsight the type of cable I am using seems less than optimal. I know exactly what kind of cables you are talking about so I may give that a shot.redwudz - Some people are adamant that Gigabyte's HDD drivers are crap and you're better off staying with the standard Windows ones.
It wasn't really my original plan to do so, but the Gigabyte manual didn't make it completely clear to me that you had to take special steps at install time to get their drivers installed so I just used the standard Windows ones by accident. Hii have asus m2n-sli deluxe, bios 0307,windows 7 ultimate 64bit and somehow my secondary data 3tb drive is seen just like 746gb.
Apologies for sort of hijacking this, but people do read our threads years down the road so a brief follow up might be appropriate.deadrats completely nailed my problem. I went to Fry's yesterday evening and bought 2 new SATA III cables with right angle connectors on one side (I was previously using straight connectors). I replaced both of my cables on my 2 TB drives and I have no more stability issues.
Hard Drive Not Showing Full Capacity Windows 7 5
I repeated a job that was causing the drives to disappear and it completed without a problem. My drives have not disappeared since I started using the new SATA cables.
They seem much more secure than the old ones. I think it's all good information. I wasn't aware that there were problems with large HDDs with some motherboards or controllers. The biggest HDDs I have at present are 2TB, but they are on fairly new MBs. I have four or five 1.5TB drives. I prefer the Silicon Image chipsets for PCI(E) HDD controller cards.
But I have an older Promise TX4 controller that seems to work fine with 1.5TB drives.I have had problems with loose SATA connectors and I have changed over to the latching type connectors. I notice my newer MBs usually come with latching connectors, so I suspect they are aware of the problem.SATA connectors are sort of a poor design for a mechanical connection, so the latching connectors are a big improvement. But I have damaged a MB connector when the latch didn't release and I pulled too hard. A bit of glue and a careful replacement of the plastic part of the connector saved it, but I am more careful now to insure the latch fully releases. Thank for replies.so far i have upgraded latest bios to 1701i have installed latest chipset drivers nforcewin764bit15.53but still no luckbios sees 3tb correctly but just diskmanager sees only 746gb.so far dont know where can be issue.is anyone using other 3tb drive internal WD30EZRSDTL directly plugged with sata cable without HBA card involved and see 3tb natively as 3tb with gpt formatted?thanks Hi,Im having the exact same problem with the exact same disc. I'm also running Win764bit. Bios also sees 3tb.Did you find a solution?
Yes he did, and posted the answer. No he did not.
The problem of vanishing drives has been resolved with better sata cables. The 3Tb HDD problem was not solved.the 3TB problem is: current motherboard design is obsolete. Your pc will not see more than 2.2TB unless you meet the following requirements:64 bit operating systemGUID partition tableBIOS with UEFIthe MBR partition table simply cannot handle more than 2.19 TB.UEFI is Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which is actually a replacement for BIOS.more info.