Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with SATA

Dual-Bay SATA Enclosures

sdis — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 15:05:09 -0800

Dual-bay SATA Enclosures! Which ones let me copy from one drive to the other on a Mac? I have my eye out on this inexpensive one, and in the end, I want a box into which I can stuff two harddrives, copy stuff between them, and copy stuff between my internal laptop harddrive and them. Bonus points if I can hook it up via USB to my Airport Extreme and get two network drives.

Will this EagleTech one do what I need? If not, what will?

(Having trouble finding detailed info on this enclosure, although from various reviews, it appears that it supports RAID 0 as well as "normal", though I'm not clear what "normal" would be in this circumstance)

USB SATA HD WTF FTW?

Admiral Haddock — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:58:09 -0800

Is my external HD enclosure killing drives? Or is it bad luck? I use a Mac.

I have this external enclosure for 2.5" drives. I put a new drive in there last year, but didn't use it until some months later (after loaning it to a friend). Drive was dead, and Disk Utility and Disk Warrior couldn't fix it. It was an extents error, and Disk Warrior alternatingly gave these errors: 2351, -36 and 2166, 2351.

My GF needed an external drive for Time Machine, and so we dropped in a new drive. Same errors, same lack of success with Disk Utility and Disk Warrior.

In each case, there has been no data on the drive, so I'm happy to pave them down to the lowest bits and bytes. A new drive is being sent by the retailer, but I don't want to kill it with the enclosure if it is at fault.

Is this an issue with the enclosure, or is this just bad luck with two different drives (by different makers)?

What caused my drive to die?

comradestu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:22:07 -0800

What happened that suddenly caused my harddrive to not be recognized by BIOS? I fired up my computer this evening to discover that none of the SATA devices were being recognized during POST/in BIOS. This included 1 LG DVD writer, 1 Seagate 1TB drive, and 1 Seagate 500gb drive.

[After panicing] I took out all 3 devices and tried them individually in two different computers. It appears that both the 1TB drive and the DVD writer are detected by BIOS on their own, and the 500gb drive is not. When the 500gb drive is coupled with either component, nothing is detected.

No strange noises are being made by this harddrive. It does sound like it's spinning up, but I can't be 100% sure. The drive was functioning fine when I was using it last night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened during the shut down procedure.

I'm running Windows 7 Pro x64, on ~2 month old hardware. Motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P. This 500gb drive (model ST3500320AS) however, is older. I'm currently looking for the receipt to determine exactly how old it is.

Do I have any hope of prying data off this drive? I don't own a SATA enclosure for 3.5" drives, but I can probably borrow one from a co-worker tomorrow (or buy one). Since having this drive plugged in seems to cause every other SATA device to stop working, I can't use a live cd to run testdisk or similar software.

More importantly, did this drive die on it's own, or could there be something else going on? How can I test for such a possibility?

(I'll mention that I do have backups of important files, so this shouldn't be a big issue.. But who wants to download 20gb of games off Steam again?)

Tell me what internal hard drive to buy for my MacPro.

Joleta — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:17:34 -0800

Tell me what internal hard drive to buy for my Mac Pro. I'd like to add a 1TB internal hard drive to my fairly new Mac Pro. I plan to use this drive for Time Machine backups. There are about a gazillion choices for internal 3.5" SATA drives. I just want to know which brand and/or model to buy. I'm interested in reliability first, price second. Personal experiences, please.

Should this SATA to ATAPI setup work?

clarkie666 — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 22:18:00 -0800

Should this SATA to PATA/IDE conversion work for a slimline DVD drive in desktop computer when the motherboard is SATA only? I am in the process of building a computer, I have a motherboard (DG41MJ) with SATA only connectors. When I ordered the Slimline DVD drive I made the mistake of ordering a E-IDE (ATAPI) version instead of a SATA one (which I didn't realize was available). I did however purchase a SATA to ATAPI converter for the drive.

My issue is that the computer will not POST past the inital BIOS screen (or even allow entry into BIOS setup) with this drive connected. With it disconnected I can BIOS setup just fine.

Now I can return it and get a SATA version with I would expect would resolve the issue, however should I expect to resolve the issue with what I have on hand, or since the motherboard is SATA only it will not (or most likely will not) support ATAPI devices even with an adaptor? Thanks!

Why can't I adapt?

tylerfulltilt — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:47:21 -0800

Trying to get a computer to recognize a dvd rom drive. But there's a snag. Mrs. FullTilt just sold off her old computer to her parents. The dvd rom drive that was in it no longer ejected. So she bought a super cheap LG dvd rom from new egg for $15 bucks to replace it.

It arrived and unfortunately it was a SATA drive and the mobo on the computer has only IDE. So we purchased an IDE to SATA adapter and tried reinstalling the dvd rom drive.

Links:
Dvd rom drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136159&Tpk=DH16NS10

Sata Adapter - http://www.bitssite.com/sata%20hdd%20ide%20aadapter/06136/cable%20adapter-converter-jack-plug/accessory.html

And so the adapter connected just fine. The drive received power, it would eject and everything. But unfortunately, XP didn't see the drive. So we went into the control panel and tried to add the drive. XP froze when we tried that.

So we tried rebooting and XP would freeze at start up everytime.
We unplugged the drive and XP booted just fine.

Where do I go from here?

Someone should just sell me this already

lundman — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:09:45 -0800

Building your own RAID, let's talk hardware options... Say the ultimate goal was to make something that looks like N5200 but ran Open Solaris for ZFS. The cheapest I have seen a N5200 is some $600. (even empty). (N7700 uses Linux, and ZFS in FUSE which I would rather not).

So assuming I need something Intel (well, or sparc I guess), 5 bays (or more), SATA.

Perhaps using something like a Q-Box 4 case, which fits 4x 5.25" space.

I should be able to fit something like a Supermicro 5 bay for the drives, which ends with 5 SATA ports. And takes up 3x 5.25" bays. The last bay in the case is half taken by the motherboard.

Now for the main board, seems the latest rage is the Intel Atom (yes?no?) and of that, the Z530 appears to be the embedded chip. Should I look at a ready made board with the chip, or a separate board, that can take the chip.

Of the Mini-ITX boards, I do not see any that directly has 5+ SATA ports:
Mini-ITX boards

So perhaps a 4-port SATA card is needed, or something drastic like using a PATA channel, with SATA adaptor.

I am guessing fanless is probably a good idea for raid? Or should I look at the MITX-6852 which appears to be aimed at embedded as well, and does come with 6-SATA ports.

Any other options to consider? I'm based in Tokyo, so I should be able to get most things, but it does make searching for information a hint harder.

That seems to land around $300, plus LCD display if I can find one to fit in a 5.25" bay.

(SATA Multiplier options are no-go.)

Diagnosing a faulty hard drive

ArmyOfKittens — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:34:25 -0800

My PC is no longer recognising one of my SATA hard drives. This morning when I turned on my PC it did not recognise any of the SATA devices - OS HD (200gb Seagate), storage HD (500gb Seagate), and DVD writer (a cheapo Samsung job). After a bit of messing about I discovered that I can boot fine with just the OS HD and the DVD plugged in, but plugging in the storage HD - whether it's the only SATA device plugged in or in any combination with the others - causes the system to stop seeing any SATA devices (and once caused it to power off as soon as it powered on).

I have nothing on the PATA port. My motherboard is a Gigabyte P31-DS3L, my PSU is a Corsair VX450, and I run Windows XP SP2. The 200gb (working) drive is about three years old, the 500gb (broken) one is a little less than a year old. The PC has not been moved recently. I've tried them all on different SATA cables and off different sockets (although the mobo only has four) and with different power cables off the PSU. I've reset the bios to "failsafe defaults". Running Windows on the working drive seems as stable as usual.

Last night I left the PC downloading, set to hibernate when it had finished getting the file.

I'm assuming the drive has just flat-out died at this point, but before I RMA I'd love some ideas to get it working again, even just for long enough to rescue some data (the data on the drive isn't important enough to actually spend money on a retrieval service, but there are some photos and documents and things it would be nice to rescue; and yes, I've learned my lesson about backing files up now!).

Hard Drive Woes

mahoganyslide — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:55:56 -0800

How do I get Windows XP to detect a new hard drive in my laptop? I have a HP DV1000 laptop. After a catastrophic hard drive crash, I bought a new 320GB hard drive off of NewEgg (seen here). Once I stick in the Windows XP install CD, it doesn't detect the new hard drive. I get the following error message:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct. This may involve running a manufacturer-supplied diagnostic or setup program. Setup cannot continue. To quick Setup press F3."

I went to the HP website and saw that the DV1000 takes ATA-5 hard drives. The one I bought was a SATA 3.0gbps 5400 rpm. Are the two not compatible at all?

Fdisk sees the hard drive and can format it to FAT32. Why can't Windows see it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Which is faster? The hare on nyquil or the tortise on crank?

Upal — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:26:23 -0800

I have a 5400rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s & 7200rpm SATA 1.5Gb/s drive. Wondering which one to put in a laptop (which one would give better performance, if noticeable). Thanks! The laptop will be used for 1) listening to music 2) running code and processing thousands of data files 3) the occasional photo edit.

Running short on cache?

Aanidaani — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:46:27 -0800

Hard drive issues: Frequently when I attempt to open a folder on my Windows Vista partition I will have to wait 5 seconds or so for the drive to spin up (I hear it). Is there some way I can fix my cache or otherwise set up the drive so that it doesn't need to spin up every time I access files on my root drive? I recently installed a new SATA drive to replace my failing IDE drive. I've divided it up into two partitions, one to store documents and another to hold my Windows Vista installation. Accessing files on both partitions is fine, it's just that there is a long delay (~5 seconds) whenever I try to access the Vista partition in Windows Explorer or through a save/open dialog.

I'm wondering if there is some way to increase the cache size so my hard drive doesn't need to spin up constantly or if there is a completely different issue at fault here that I don't understand. Any help would be appreciated.

Sata RAID controller in V64?

notsnot — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:23:14 -0800

SATA card for Vista 64? I've recently gone to the dark side and upgraded to Vista 64 (from xp64...ugh!). My current mother board has the usual bank of SATA ports, and I've been RAIDing pairs of drives (mirrored) from those ports.

The motherboard is wonky - arrays break apart, the LAN ports wake up and die randomly, and identical BIOS settings have different results. I'm replacing it.

I'd like to get a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Mostly, for scratch space - I do a lot of photoshop, and would like to make a striped array for scratch. (the other drives will be boot, and storage that will be synctoy-backed up offsite.) However, I'm having a hell of a time finding cards (mostly looking at Newegg) at a reasonable price that are specifically Vista 64 compatible. Vista has been out for what, 1.5 years, so you'd think they got around to it by now.

My other thing is price. As evidenced by my use of existing SATA drives, it should be obvious that I'm kinda tight right now.

In short, I need a four-port, SATA, hardware raid controller that is *sure* to work in Vista 64, and won't break the bank.

Please help two drives co-exist

jonathanbell — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:24:59 -0800

SATA I or II? Hopefully very simple question about hard drives I'm looking to buy a new internal hard drive for my ageing Dell. Thing is, I'm not sure about compatability. The original drive is described as '250 GB 1st SATA' on the Dell spec sheet. My question is, would this have been Serial ATA-300 or Serial ATA-150? What's the difference? All the drives I'm looking at seem to be ATA-300. Can this co-exist with the original drive? The computer was bought in February 2004, if that helps.

Help me find my old hard drive.

DulcineaX — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:28:02 -0800

Why would my hard drive show up in the BIOS, but not in Windows? My boyfriend's main hard drive seems to have failed. When we tried to boot it yesterday, it gave us the message that the "self monitoring system has reported that a parameter has exceeded its normal operating range" and would not boot into windows. I ended up putting in a new hard drive and installing Vista to that drive, so now we can at least get the thing booted. But now, once in Windows, it only sees the new hard drive and the old storage drive (that didn't have Windows on it).

I'm trying to figure out how I can just see the original hard drive in order to get data off of it. It shows up in the BIOS, but once in Windows it's not listed in My Computer. I've also looked under Computer Management in Administrative Tools, and it's not listed there either.

Other random info:
- There are four hard drive bays in the computer.
- These are SATA drives.
- I have more familiarity with this stuff than any of my friends/family, but I'm not exactly a guru or anything.
- I'd like to avoid taking the drive somewhere if possible, because I'm a little paranoid about my data getting erased. I know that the information might just be gone, but I'd like to keep Geek Squad etc. as a last resort.

If there's any more information that I can provide please ask; I'm getting a little desperate at this point...it's finals week of senior year in college and could really use some of that data! Thanks so much for any advice.

Hints on diagnosing HD failure

elpapacito — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:43:15 -0800

SATA Hard disk , suddendly not spinning up. No click of death, no sign of expected failure. As sending the HD to a lab is out of question, I was wondering if there is some other procedure to try. I remember hearing that consumer HD have a quite long "recovery time" which is an amount of time in which the HD tries to recover corrupted data, a feature that isn't found on some RAID hd who handle the processing to RAID logic.

I was wondering how long this time is, if the disk is supposed to spin up (which would make sense) and what is the most frequent known cause of "sudden" hd death.

Hard drive pain.

gjc — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:15:04 -0800

Highly technical hard drive filter: My hard drive failed. Came home, and PC was sitting at the "where's my hard drive" BIOS screen, to my great horror. My question is more of a "please confirm my diagnosis" and "what have I missed" sort of thing. Hard drive does not spin at all. In fact, it does nothing at all. Doesn't spin, click, hum, vibrate, whine. And the PC doesn't see it.

I looked at the controller board and could find no burnt spots nor any visual indication that something was fried. I even pulled off the board to make sure the contacts were clean. Completely fine, visually. If I give the drive a twist along the axis of the platters, I can hear them move, so I know the platters aren't stuck. And there is nothing rattling around inside.

So my thinking is that the controller simply went belly up, and if I go out and get another identical hard drive and swap controllers, it will function long enough to get the data off. I have done this in the past with success, on an older IDE drive of the 4GB vintage. This drive is a 7 year old SATA drive.

But there are comments on websites saying that there is "tuning" information on the controller, and thus it won't work. I'm not sure I believe that- sounds more like scare tactics perpetrated by data recovery people to drum up business. But maybe not? Is the bad sector table stored on the board?

Anyway, thanks in advance.

Damn you, computers!

jytsai — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:08:24 -0800

I lost the little jumper that sets the SATA drive from SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) to SATA I (1.5 Gb/s). Where can I buy/steal a replacement?

Storage-arrays for moderate nerds!

cgomez — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 19:55:43 -0800

What is the best way to create an expandable storage array with eight 500GB SATA drives? Currently, I have 6x500GB SATA disk drives. Five of them are part of a Windows "spanned dynamic volume" so that one volume would use space from multiple drives but appear as just one drive letter. One drive is partitioned to hold the operating system (Windows Vista) and some other data. I have recently purchased two additional 500GB drives to either help expand the setup or add some redundancy.

It has dawned on me that using a spanned volume is a bloody terrible idea because if one of the drives fail, I lose more than 2TB of data. I'm not terribly concerned about data loss since it's almost all just ripped multimedia I can re-rip, but I'd rather lose at most 460GB if there is a drive failure.

My question is, with 7x500GB drives (3255GB of formatted space), what is the best way I can create a semi-reliable storage array where all data is under one drive letter? If I wanted to start doing a RAID-5 type thing, would I need an independent RAID controller or can it be done by software if it is a purported feature of my motherboard? Would some of the drives being connected a PCI-X SATA expansion card being an issue?

I'm not tied to Windows, so if I'd have to change to a Linux OS, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I'd prefer to stick with Windows Vista.

computer help: IDE HDD and SATA DVD drive: why does the computer freeze up on start-up?

Jhoosier — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 06:58:57 -0800

Would IDE HDD and SATA DVD drives confuse each other on boot up? How do I tell if my dvd drive is mucked up? My dvd drive finally crapped out on me after 2 years, so I went out and got a new one. While looking, I saw the SATA one wasn't any more expensive than the Ultra IDE one, so I got it. I'd bought a SATA HDD and a IDE one for storage when I built the rig 2 yrs before, though the SATA crashed and burned about 4 months after I got it. Living in Japan and the warranty being for the US, a $50 HDD wasn't worth the hassle to mail it back to be checked out and all that, so I made do with my IDE one.

Anyways, after getting the dvd drive, things were going ok for a month or so, then it started freezing quite a bit and I'd have to restart. Eventually, it got to the point that the computer would freeze on the XPC splash screen and not do anything. Upon booting, it will show the graphics card info, then go to the Shuttle XPC splash screen and freeze. On a normal boot, it would then try to boot from the dvd drive, but since there's never anything bootable there, it moves on to the HDD. After unplugging the dvd drive, everything works AOK. So it's probably something to do with my dvd drive. Do you think it's a bad drive, or are the SATA and IDE confusing each other and something's messed up? Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Mac mini cannot see sata drive

jdl — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 18:22:20 -0800

Liquid was spilled into and fried my MacBook Pro. The local Apple fix-it shop removed my HD for me and put it into an external case. The Mac mini I have access to does not see the drive. This was a 2.5 SATA drive which was put into a case with 3 connections on the back: usb to usb, power to usb, and sata. When I couldn't get it to mount (there is no error message, it does not even show up when I look at About This Mac.. More Info under USB) I went back to the fix-it guy.

He plugged it into his iMac, it showed up and I saw all of my files. He plugged both usb cables (the usb to usb and power to usb) into his Mac. I've tried that, to no avail. The mini is a G4. I tried a G5 PowerMac in my office and it didn't work. Both machines are running Leopard.

I'll be buying a new MBP, but with the rumors of a refreshed line this Tuesday, I'm waiting. But I'd like to get to my data. Should this drive be mountable on the mini? Or the G5? The fix-it guy was stumped and so am I.

NoIWillNotFixYourComputerFilter

Lockeownzj00 — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:49:42 -0800

NoIWillNotFixYourComputerFilter: I've got a 500 gig that won't show up in Windows XP. Help! So I bought this 500 gig IDE drive. I'm using Windows XP SP2. I installed it in my box. My BIOS sees it. Windows doesn't. In Disk Manager, I see it as a 128 gig drive, but it still doesn't appear in Explorer (even if it did, I want those other 372 other gigs dammit). I tried using this firmware update via floppy for my hard drive controller (promise ide ultra100 tx2), but booting it up yielded a split screen: half was the menu, half was blackness.

So uh. wtf? I've scoured google and found people with similar problems, especially people with SATA drives. But that's not what I've got, so. Could anybody lend me some pearls of wisdom? I'm pretty sure it's not a loose ribbon.

My MadDog enclosure should be called HotDog

penciltopper — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:48:40 -0800

My new HD enclosure gets really hot. Should I worry? I just got one of these and although it's just what I wanted, it's still really HOT after copying 40gb onto it two hours ago.

Not having an IR thermometer handy I'd say it's holding-hot-coffee-in-a-paper-cup hot.
Uncomfortable in the hand; wouldn't want it in my lap.

It says it's anodized metal, but it feels like plastic.
There doesn't seem to be any venting; but does a HD in a box need to be vented?
I've got it oriented vertically on its stand for maximum heat dissipation, but I can't see that making much difference.

I'm worried that I'm going to bake my data right off the thing. It has to be plugged in and turned on 24/7.

Should I just take the drive out and drill some air holes in the enclosure? Will that let the magic out?

Or is it b0rken and I should send it back as the Ford Pinto of HD enclosures?

enclosure for 2.5in and 3.5in drives?

advil — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:42:54 -0800

Is there such a thing as a hard drive enclosure that supports both SATA 2.5in and 3.5in drives? I need to try to do some one-off data recovery on a 2.5in SATA drive. However, it seems like a 3.5in enclosure is more generally useful, and I have a 3.5in drive I accidentally bought that is much larger than my current hard drives (future-shock inducing even), and I have to decide whether to return it or get an enclosure for it. Preferably this would be something at least as cheap as just buying two enclosures (I've seen some complicated and expensive multi-drive enclosures but that's not really what I'm looking for).

So ideally I'd like a single device that I can use for my one-off data recovery and then use as an actual enclosure for 3.5in drives. My feeble searches are not turning up anything.

Connect my drive to my mac please!

smithmac_99 — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:40:47 -0800

How do I connect my NTFS hard drive to my new mac? Based on this question, I yanked my old drives and put them in a USB 2.0 enclosure. I can plug them in to my laptop and they mount fine, but when I plug them into my mac, zippo...What did I do wrong?

How to take an internal hard drive and make it external

smithmac_99 — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 21:07:30 -0800

What do I need to know about hard drive enclosures? My computer (PC) died this morning and I want to pull out the 2 hard drives and use them as external drives for my new Mac. I don't know if they're FAT32 or NTFS. I don't know if they're IDE or SATA. How do I find out? Do I need to? A little background on my old PC. It was one of the first P4 3.0 PCs with hyperthreading technology. I've had it for ~4 years