3 TB HDD on ICH10R (Dell Precision WorkStation T3500) not identified

Hi Chrisne,

Sounds like you are going to need a controller card to run these drives. I would contact WD about which one to use.

Hello Osprey4, thank you for the reply,

I think, that´s the best idea. I will try that and ordered a new controller card. Although WD has a bundle offer for some other 3 TB harddisk including a SATA-controller, this controller can not be ordered stand alone. The Western Digital Support was no help. Hope my new controller card will manage with it.

Christian

Additional Information: I installed a cheap PCIe Controller Card (Delock 89270, 2 x internal SATA, RAID 0,1, Marvell Controller Chip 9128) and combined the two 3 TB harddisks as a RAID-1-System. All drivers were in Windows 7 resp. came automatically with the Windows online update. After 4 reboots and partitioning with GPT it works! :-)

Hi ChrisNe,

Good to hear that worked!

ChrisNe,

I am experiencing a similar situation with my brand new Precision T5500 with Win7 64-bit.  For me the Intel Matrix Storage Manager option ROM ICH10R/DO v8.5.2.1002 recognizes the drive as only 746.5 GB, and consequently the Disk Manager in the operating system does too. AFAIK, that’s the latest driver?   Interestingly, the Intel Matrix Storage Manager application above the OS does see the new drive as 2.8 TB but I cannot use it to just partition the drive; the boot drive must be selected and it wants to make one large partition.  

So I am using an Optiplex 790 to GPT, partition, & format the 3 TB drivers and then physically move them over to the Precision, which is recognizing it correctly.  Note my partitions are less than the 2.2 TB limitation.

Dell needs to update the BIOS with the latest RST OROM from Intel. Currently A11 is using Intel's v8, whereas Intel already released 10.5+.

I am confirming that this is a problem. System: Dell T3500 Precision Desktop (2011 model) with Intel ICH10R/DO controller and Win7 64bit.

I installed a new 3TB HDD from Seagate and encountered the following problem. The BIOS/boot time raid menu incorrectly identifies the drive size, as does Windows. Interestingly enough the "Matrix Storage Manager" correctly identifies the drive - as shown in the annotated screenshot below.

The RAID controller is on version 8.5.2.1002, I'm going to hunt for an updated version and see if this is a) Available, b) Fixes the problem.

Ash [Feb 2013]

PS: Installing a second controller (as suggested above) is a workaround but *should not* be necessary, this hardware is only 2 years old and we all knew that larger capacity drives were coming. Intel is entirely at fault for screwing this up.

** GOOD NEWS **

I have a complete solution for anyone experiencing this problem. The latest BIOS update from Dell updates the Matrix storage controller and now the 3TB drive is correctly supported.

To do this:

a) Head to dell.com and enter your service tag and head to the downloads/updates/software/drivers page.

b) Look for the BIOS update and download it. The latest version (as of writing) for the T3500 is from 2002.

c) Run the update from within Windows. It will assess your current version and prompt to perform the update. On my system this was upgrading A12 to A16. The upgrade process does not require a floppy disk (hurrah!) but will restart your system.

That's it, hope this helps.

Ash [Feb 2013]

PS: Final post from me on this topic. As I reported above upgrading the Dell BIOS to A16 allowed the RAID controller to detect the correct disk size. However, Windows still did not see this correct disk size right away. I upgraded the driver (download the latest driver file from Intel, not sure if the link below will work, and from the "device manager" do a manual driver update on the "Storage Controllers"->ICHXXX/XXX/XX...etc... storage controller device) to the latest driver and then everything worked perfectly.

Here's the link:

downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchResult.aspx

That was awesome! Really helped. Except for one small thing, you need to uninstall the previous driver as in my case or it would not let me install any driver stating that the driver installed was the latest and it did not need updating.