Problem making external SATA drive internal.

OK so I have a 500gb external USB sata drive and I wanted to make it
internal.

I opened up the case and when I dismanteled it a bit the drive pulled out.

So I then bought a SATA cable and a SATA power cable and connected i
the drive in my computer but it is as if the drive is not there, nothing in
BIOS
indicates I have a SATA drive.


i have never used a SATA drive internally before.

I am wondering what the problem is?

A poor connection? The SATA connector on the mobo
has never been used (6 years +) so it wil hardly be in pristine condition.

I was thinking perhaps drivers but I don't think I would need any driver.

 

I should ass I have put the drive back in to it's usb housing and I
am using it again as an external drive, so there was nothing wrong with
the drive.

 

wel i think i ha foudn the problem, the data data cable, very poor quality,
appears to have plastic over the conenction on one side, covering 2-3
connections.

I am atemptng to scrape this off toexpose the connector, if not I will buy
another,
only 99p at local store.

 

Occasionally, the problem with detection is due to the
BIOS module running the SATA chip. At least one chip was
set up *only* for RAID. And in that case, you needed to
connect two hard drives, before the BIOS code would respond.
It makes that particular SATA chip and pair of ports,
kinda useless.

But that doesn't happen too often. Most of the rest
are quite reasonable when it comes to their behavior.

It should "just work" (famous last words)

On SATA cables, all of mine came in the motherboard
box. And they all worked, with no complaints. Maybe
insertion force is a little high on a couple of them.

There is one other kind of fault you won't want to
run into. Some SATA connectors on the motherboard, were
so poorly made, when you go to pull out the red SATA data
cable when you're done, it pulls the motherboard connector
right out of the motherboard Again, that's an older
system. In terms of connector design, SATA got off
to a poor start, with snapped connectors, lack of
retention features (cable falls out), stuff that should
have been caught. But for the most part, the stuff I've
tried recently has behaved itself.

Paul

 

Yea the cable kind of fell out as well, and it was cracked (not sure if I
did that)
but it had useless connectors.

Thanks,
Well I have been down to the computer store and they had no 99p
cables as advertised online, something that looked a bit fishy anyway as the
same cable
was also advertised for £3.99 as seen here:-
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/searc...xx/sata+cable/1_12/price-asc/xx-criteria.html

No surprise for guessing the real price (£3.99), anyhow there was also this
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/dynam...ide-drive-to-sata-converter-02796375-pdt.html

Which includes a SATA cable on the back (not shown) and also a power cable
I was not too sure what it does but it may come in useful, I think it will
convert
my existing (good) IDE drive to a SATA, thus it will do the same for the bad
drive so
it might be interesting to see if connecting it as a SATA improves it's boot
problems.


Anyway back to the new cable, that worked fine and the drive was detected in
the BIOS
at boot .Windows did want to check it for errors, which it did and found
none. I assume/hope it
won't want to do that every boot time.

But it's looking pretty good at the moment, I shoud be be able to make that
drive bootable.
It's 500GB, twice the size of the bad drive and 6 times the size of this
80gb drive.
So I will have to decide how to partition it, there is room for an extra
partitionon it,
so maybe I could have LINUX on it as well or whatever.
It also should be faster, at least faster than this one.

I tried a bennchmark on it with ND tune and it started at doin 60mb/s an
dropped off
to 40mb/s a the end. I also ran it on this old drive t compare and it
started at 55mb/s
and dropped down to 30mb/s so maybe not much fasster, however within that
the speed
dropped dramattically a few time, perhap because it was in use elsewhere, I
wil have to check up on that
as it might be problem. (but probably not).

I got the faulty SATA cable form here.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=251018535527&ssPageName=ADME:L:OC:GB:3160

I can't really complain at the price (£2 in P&P - lol) because at least the
power cable was OK. The SATA cable
had very pooor connectors, soft plastic poorly moulded covering some
conections completely.

I think I said I also got an external IDE enclosure which works well so I
can use
the bad drive as well now, I tried running an error scann on it, but it was
very slow as
an external drive. It did fnd errors which were different from the when I
scanned it before,
there was a series of red bocks together as opposed to being scattered in 4
spots before hand,
so maybe the dirve is getting bad. It also kind of got stuck on the scan,
maybe I will try scanning
with a differeent drive scan test, the one I used first time for a better
comparision.

 

Oh I also notice the 500gb (old external sata drive) is formatted
FAT32 not NTFS, not sure why thtat is but I guees it does not matter too
much. I'd have to make most NTFS if I make a bootable drive of it.

 

There's the 4GB file size limit on FAT32.

Don't start downloading a 4.5GB file to that disk with your
browser, because it may claim "no space left" before the
download finishes.

Paul

 

Don't think I have ever downloaded any single file mush more than 1 gig.
The biggest files I have are recordings from TV which used to get up to
about 4.5gb, so presmably they were split at that point for some reason
as there were none bigger. But it was a not a FAT32 drive so I am unsure
why,
but 4.5 gb is pretty bing.

I break my recording into 650gb chunks anyway because the recorder
has a tendancy to lose some files, so the ssmaller the better.
Maybe the lost files were indicative of problems on the drive however
I was unaware of any other files being lost.

Allso would it being FAT32 make the drive slow?
The benchmark I got for it seeems slow which is a bit disappointing,
perhaps as it is was an external drive used ove a usb 2 interface there was
no need
for the drive to be fast, hence it isn't.


THe drives id is
WD5000AAVS-00ZTBO or perhaps
WD5000AAVS-00ZTB0

One theread here says

http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/slow-write-speeds-wd-500gb-drive-t4048173.html

"although its reading speeds seem normal (around 50-60 MB/
s), its write speeds were shockingly low (around 10 MB/s,"

The read speed seems sonsistant with my benchmark (60mb/s) not sure about
the write speed, it wasnot given in the bencmark I did.


Here
http://reviews.cnet.com/internal-hard-drives/wd-caviar-green-wd5000aavs/4507-9998_7-33181708.html

It gives speed of 300 300 MBps 300 MBps 300 MBpsMBps which seems very
fast, but it;s not the full drive ID.

I will have to do some more searching.

 

HDTune doesn't use the file system when benchmarking. For example,
if you had a Linux EXT3 disk plugged into your Windows computer,
Windows couldn't see any of the partitions, but yet, HDTune
could benchmark it. That's because HDTune accesses the device
at the block level, and not through a file system.

The payware version of HDTune supports write benchmarking.
While the free version just does read benchmarks (non-destructive).

Write speed at the file system level can be slow on a modern
disk, due to 4KB internal sectors plus 512e emulation. That's
where the alignment of the partition, with respect to 4KB
boundaries comes into play. I've tried to fix that by hand
(doing alignment in Linux), but never succeeded in ending
up with something I could actually use. (Always some piece of
software complaining about something...)

Linux is capable of reporting the internal sector type used.
The fdisk command would show something like this, if you
have a disk with 4KB internal sectors, but providing 512
byte emulation suitable for usage with older OSes (so-called 512e).

Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 512 bytes

This article shows an example of fdisk output. The line of
interest, is sandwiched in the blurb when fdisk starts.
In this example, the disk shows 512 / 512 and no emulation
of sector size is involved.

http://lwn.net/Articles/377895/

So that's an "excuse" for a modern disk to be slow. I've seen
some peculiar behavior on my 500GB disks, whereas older
smaller disks are much more predictable. The older disks
are slow, because, well, they're slow. Whereas the more
modern disks are fast under some circumstances (HDTune),
and not in others (the real world).

Paul

 

I will have to check those benchmarks, the speeds do not look that slow,
it's just that
the old drive appeared to be faster than it had been in the past hence the
500GB drive
may not be slow afterall.

Iknow I reported in an earlier post that a copy fI did from the 80gb to the
250 gb
works out at 25 megabytes/s which is slow in comparison, but then wiith it
being a wrtie
you woudl expect that.


i alos have these results with
http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en
500gb internal drive
read write

seq 76.17 73.63 (MB/S)
512k 34.48 43.64
4k 0..503 1.301
4k qd32 0.575 1.288



250gb external drive (the bad drive in an enclosure) or was it the 80GB
internal drive?
I think it was the 80GB internal drive actually, but I was also running a
drive scan on it at the same
time so not a very good test realllly!!
read write
seq 36 30 (MB/S)
512k 19.78 16.92
4k 0.300 0.705
4k qd32 0.497 0.691



I will have to repeat the test under better conditions.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...08/Average-Read-Transfer-Performance,658.html

Some benchmarks above, oneis for the bad drive, which comes in at 58MB/S
So the 500GB drive may infact be a bit faster, which is what I expected as
it is a newer drive.

 

Yes I can get a bit confused about all this stuff, I think these file
systems and partitions
are somewhat artifical constructs, I think ultimately at the lowerst level
you just tell the drive
to read or write a particular 'chuck' of data, the correct terminology may
be block, I'am
not sure. Although it seems you can have blocks of various sizes.

I get confused about track and cylinder block sector etc..
It seems as the drive size increases it is the number of cylinders which
increases.
I am finding this program very useful, but I just realised itis a fre trial
and I onlyhave 9 days
left!!!

http://disk-monitor.com/


I can see from it the number of cyliners gores up from about 10,000, to
30,000
to 50,000 on my 80, 250 and 500 GB drives respectively, the number of tracks
and
sector remains the same. I don't see how the number of cylinders can be so
high unless the drive
has about 20 to 100 platters, but maybe they can? I seem some images of some
with about 10
platters.

So does the drive phyically read 4kb when the system tells it to read a 512
byte sector?

I remember at one time in my first job I was supposed to write driver for a
disk drive
after I had written a printer driver, but I just could not understand thier
descriptions of blocks
and records etc so they gave up trying to explain it to me, which is pitty
as I would have liked
to do that. I prehaps should have just got on with it and figured itout as I
went along, I often find the
explaination seems more complicated than the reality, once you know how it
works.

I just noticed that on this page it seems to have the 500GB drive
which I reported here as WD5000AAVS-00ZTB0
On the page there is a Western Digital Caviar RE2-GP
WD5000AACS,SATA/300,500 GB,16 MB Cache

Which is a fairly similar name, AAVS versus AACS and the speed is 62.10mb/s
which is slightly faster than the 250gb drive
Samsung SpinPoint P SP2514N,UltraATA/133,250 GB,8 MB Cache
Which comes in at 58mb/s (v 62.1mb/s) so slightly faster, which is fine and
the
250 gb drive was noticably faster than the old drive, which I am currently
using.

So if I can make the 5000gb drive bootable I should be fine. (as long as it
lasts more
than a couple of months!!). I sometime wonder if there was a problem with
that
disc cloning program I used which caused problems when the drive filled up
becuase
the problem occured so soon after using it.

It willl be lot worse if the same happens on the 500GB drive as it will take
me longer to fill
it!!

I might even try doing the partitioning and formatting by hand so to speak
using DOS.
It does not matter if it does not work as I can always redo it. So basicaly
just make the partition
format them and copy the stuff acrosss manually. I might learn more that
way, even if it just to
learn it does not work!!!

 

CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) is obsolete.

The actual geometry, bears little resemblance to those numbers.

For example, my 500GB drive has one platter, two heads (one on
either side of the platter). Whereas the geometry has a
ridiculously high value for head count.

The actual layout of the platter is zoned, so the amount
of data per track is variable. You can see the zoning,
in the stair-step benchmark curve for the drive.

*******

The drive, when it reads, it holds the read in a cache. It could
well read the entire track, and cache it. If the read command
calls for 512 bytes, that much will be transferred out of the
cache. The excess information might be considered "read-ahead",
so it's possible the next command will go faster because the
data is already in drive cache memory.

On a write, that's where the 512e emulation comes in. There may need
to be a fractional write, at the end of an operation. The drive
can do a read-modify-write for that 4K sector. The drive knows
it can only deal in 4KB sectors. And if 512 byte emulation is
present, then it might have to read 4KB worth, change 512 bytes of
it with the info it just got for the write, then write out the
newly modified 4KB sector again. Doing those operations, slows
the drive down. And especially, if clusters (~32KB size on FAT32)
are not aligned on 4KB boundaries.

I've tried fixing that (for example, using the Linux tricks to
prepare a partition), but all I can remember is it caused
nothing but problems, and I had to undo it again.

Paul

 

Which is a fairly similar name, AAVS versus AACS and the speed is

Seems there is a lot more to drives than a lot of people realise. One of the
biggest
problems is small files as opposed to big files. I used to play poker quite
a lot and
the poker program would store a small hand history file for each hand.
Problem was there
were hundreds of thousands of them, on some days I could easily play about
1,000 hands!!
It causes a real problem when it comes to things like virus scans and copies
and backups because
it always grinds to a halt when it hits that huge pile of small files of all
stored in files of usually 1kb or 2kb.
They later moved to storing a whole session or days worth of hands in a
file, which was a
vast improvement, from the copying and backup perspective, although someone
more
difficult to find aparticular hand. I don't play poker much now so I have
archieved all the hands off
my computer to stop them causing problems.

Anyhow I will have a go at cloning onto my 500 gig drive soon so I will
have two bootable drives soon.
However haveing two drives does cause problems unless I regularly reclone.