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I recently bought a used 2TB WD Green (WD20EADS) hard drive at a hamfest. The problem is, I've tried it on two different computers (described below), and neither one is able to detect it as a 2TB drive. Depending upon which program I ask, its size has been variously reported as "1191.97GB", "1280GB", and 1,220,575 megabytes.
I know it's not going to show up as "2,000 gigabytes", but I also know that the kB-vs-KiB difference isn't going to account for a loss of ONE THIRD of the drive's nominal capacity.
Computer #1: Asus P5N-D motherboard (latest BIOS, circa 2010) running Windows 7 Pro (64-bit).
Computer #2: Dell Precision m4800 laptop (circa November 2013) using Orico USB3.0 dock ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CE65C4W ) running Windows 10 Pro (64-bit). I've successfully used this dock on this computer to connect 4TB drives, so I'm pretty confident that the controller in the dock is working fine. Furthermore, I actually HAVE a 2TB 2.5" internal hard drive (along with a 512GB mSATA card), so I'm quite confident that THIS computer can handle 2TB drives just fine.
S.M.A.R.T. (via WD Data Lifeguard) claims there's nothing wrong with the drive (I considered the possibility that it might have silently written off an entire platter due to failure… but if that's what happened, the app's not admitting it).
I did a full erase using Western Digital's Drive Lifeguard diagnostic program. No change.
I tried jumpering pins 5 and 6 (to force 1.5TB PHY) and rebooting. No change.
I've tried changing between GPT & MBR and rebooting. No change.
The problem with computer #1 didn't particularly shock me (it IS, after all, kind of old), but the fact that it exhibits the exact same problem on a newer computer running Windows 10 WAS a complete surprise.
I'm completely stumped. What else could cause a 2TB drive to be seen by Windows as a much smaller drive than it actually is (on a computer that has dealt with MUCH larger drives in the past without problems)?
You might be able to enter the serial numbers for your drives at https://support.wdc.com/warranty/warrantystatus.aspx which would be a way of checking what Western Digital thinks the drives are...
– Mokubai – 2018-02-16T07:14:31.330@Kamil -- HPA was definitely the problem. I downloaded HDAT2, which instantly spotted the HPA & made it fairly easy to blow it away and restore the drive to its full 2TB size. Post this as an answer, and I'll mark it as the correct one since you were the first to suggest it. – Bitbang3r – 2018-02-20T22:14:59.600