Can onboard SATA of MA785GMT-UD2h see a 4TB hard drive (AHCI) ?

[tombet]

I've had the MA785GMT-UD2h (rev 1.1, BIOS F9) for almost 4 years and its been great.   I decided to change my hard drives, and use an SSD as a boot/system drive, and a large 4TB Western Digital Green drive for data storage.   

The SSD boot drive is great.  But the brand new 4TB drive is only being seen as 1667GB unallocated.  (I know about the MBR and GPT issues.  This size is before I even made the choice - but I did choose GPT.)      I've got the controller configured as AHCI (not Raid, not IDE.)   I've tried different SATA cables and different SATA ports - no difference. 

I'm wondering if I have a defective drive, or is the AMD Sata controller of that MB incompatible with such a large drive ?   If there is a size limit, what is it ?   (I've checked the user manual and online specs, and searched this forum, but cannot see any stated limit.)

Thank you.

[Tiger]

In addition to using a GPT format, a data drive requires an OS that supports long LBA addressing and a driver that correctly supports high capacity hard drives.

[tombet]

Right, I am using Win 7 (w/sp1) 64bit.  I had thought I was using the most recent AMD Sata controller driver as I went to the motherboard's specific support page for downloads, and got the most current one there.   But your response did prompt me to look into the driver more closely.  Thank you. 

I had been using an old driver.  With a newer driver, the issue is solved, and the full 4TB drive is now seen.     

The version of the AMD SATA driver that does not see it is dated 05/05/2009 with version 1.2.0.125. (That's the one you currently get if you download from the MA785GMT page on USA site.)

But, on the general downloads section of the gigabyte website, NOT on the support page specific to the MA785GMT motherboard, there is a newer driver dated 10/12/2012, version 1.21.337.   

After updating to this newer driver, all is well.   

[Vezina]

What happens if you use the default Windows driver ,which in most cases is the better choice.
AMD AHCI drivers sometimes give stability issues.

[tombet]

The Windows AHCI driver also works.   One difference with it, is under device manager, it shows 8 IDE channels (4 master-slave pairs.)

I ran a 8 hour stress test and did not see any sign of instability with the updated AMD driver.  I'm going to stick with it for the time being at least. 

[tombet]

btw, I had opened a support ticket with Gigabyte tech support.  They responded today, and closed the ticket, saying the board's controller cannot handle drives > 2TB.   Clearly not true - as the 4TB drive works fine and completed the Extended WD diagnostics (took 12 hours to run) without so much as one warning.

Here is Giagbyte replay:

Dear customer,

Unfortunately GA-MA785GMT-UD2H was old chipset board use Award bios which only be able support up to 2TB capacity drives.

Best regards,

Gigabyte technical support team.