Why is my new Toshiba N300 16TB internal HDD not showing up as a drive in my dell optiplex 9020?

afennell

I recently purchased a Toshiba N300 16TB internal HDD as I am converting my old dell optiplex 9020 SFF into a NAS. This drive is solely used for storage and will not be bootable/contain an OS. The primary boot drive is a 1 TB crucial SSD. I have a splitter cable for the SATA power supply with one that is connected to the SSD and the other to the HDD. There is one sata data cable for the SSD and HDD in sata ports 0 and 1 respectively. However when I go to boot the computer the HDD is not showing up. Even when I go to the BIOS setup screen there is no drive showing up. I then reconnected the original HDD that came with the computer and the BIOS/OS were able to detect that drive so I don't think it is a wiring configuration issue. I also don't think it is a power issue as the SSD only uses 5V and both HDDs use 12V. The OS I am using is open media vault 6 (Based on Debian 11). I have read that for bootable drives the dell optiplex only works with drives up to 2TB, but this is not a bootable drive so it shouldn't be an issue. Are there any thoughts on why this isn't working? Is the drive just defective? I am thinking of getting an external enclosure for the Toshiba HDD to see if it needs a driver or something.

Ian

Greetings,

A couple of things to check, make sure you have a cable going from your power supply to your drive, and then a SATA data cable from the drive to the motherboard directly. You can also verify with another SATA port on your motherboard and see if your computer can see it then.

You'll also want to ensure the drive has been partitioned for use in Windows

Windows 10: https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/57-how-to-initialize-and-format-a-newly-installed-secondary-drive-in-windows-10

Windows 11: https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/683-how-to-initialize-and-format-a-newly-installed-secondary-drive-in-windows-11

afennell

Thank you for the reply! So the sata connections are all correct as I was able to hook up another internal HDD and have the bios/OS detect it. I was able to get the toshiba HDD to be detected when I used an external enclosure and that is currently what I am settled on. I am using an OS based on debian 11 (open media vault 6), but the bios should detect the drive regardless of formatting correct? I now I can format the drive in debian