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I can't figure out what the h*** is going on here but I have an easystore WD 8TB HDD (WD80EMAZ) that I shucked out of its enclosure to put into my computer as an internal drive instead. It works perfectly fine when I put the SATA to USB3.0 board back on and connect it to the computer with the USB cable and its included power adapter but If I take that board back off and connect the drive to a known working SATA port and known working SATA power cable, it doesn't show up in windows or in the bios. I don't see it in disk manager or device manager. It won't even attempt to spin up. I'm wondering if its just incompatible with my current configuration?

I have a Gigabyte Z370 Auros Gaming 5 on bios firmware 15a (latest).

I believe I have the correct drivers installed for RAID, RST, and SATA.

My boot drive is a RAID 0 array of 2 Samsung 960 Evo 250GB M.2 SSDs in slots M2M_32G and M2A_32G (which disables SATA port 0).

I also have a Samsung 850 Evo 1TB drive connected to SATA port 1 for game storage.

I have dual GTX 1080s in the top 2 PCIe X16 slots.

Nothing is in bottom PCIe X4 slot or the M2P_32G slot.

SATA mode is Intel RST with optane acceleration.

I'm trying to connect the WD drive to SATA port 2 or 3 but like I said the drive doesn't even spin up.

I disconnected the 850 Evo and put this drive in it's place and nothing. I've tried every single SATA port on my power supply which is an EVGA Supernova 1000W Fully Modular.

I tried enabling hot plug for all of the SATA ports.

I tried switching the SATA mode to AHCI but then my bios wouldn't even boot and I had to reset it.

I did noticed that they all say they are configured as eSATA and I'm not quite sure what that means.

Is there a difference between how a SATA SSD and SATA HHD are recognized by the computer? Why would one of them work and not the other when I've proven that the drive and cables are perfectly fine...?

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    Interesting puzzle. ESATA is just SATA connected externally to PC, so slightly differently connector and power supply requirements. I posit the difference is less likely to be SSD vs HDD related and more likely to be < 2=tb vs largerer "advanced format" drive size. The geometry for internal and external drives is often different which can be problematic - this could stop data being visible, but should not stop disk being detected in BIOS/UEFI.
    – davidgo
    Commented May 2, 2020 at 23:37

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Ok. So I figured out what the issue was and I have to say I would have never thought of this...

The solution was to pull out the 3V pins from the SATA power connector and just electrical tape them so they don't get into trouble. As soon as I did this and plugged the power cable back in, the drive was instantly recognized.

I don't know exactly why this worked but I found the solution in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/6vwk7h/biosuefi_wont_detect_wd_8tb_easystore_drive/

I'm also kind of upset in a weird way about how dumb the solution is...

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    Great work figuring this out, thanks for letting us know the solution. Must have been fiddly to cover those tiny pins with tape or pull them out. Nice job. Found a WD pdf that suggests using a Molex to SATA power connector should also solve this. For what it's worth I haven't had this trouble with Seagate 2TB drives removed from enclosures. Thanks again.
    – David Pierson
    Commented May 3, 2020 at 0:50

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