Hard disk not recognized on Z390 Maximus XI Hero Wi-Fi

[_Luca_]

I just bought 2x WD Ultrastar HC550 (18TB) but I'm afraid both arrived dead, maybe due to poor packaging (no bubbles at all!).

To try to rule out this, I've updated the bios to 1802**  but they don't show in the bios at all and actually they make the system (Win10 64bit) hang a little when going into Explorer to the point their presence cause troubles to visualizing other drives and partitions.

The cables seem to be fine as I had other drives attached.
Currently I already had 2x m.2 nvme ssd and 6x sata drives, configured in AHCI mode, so I just wanted to replace two of these old drives with the new ones but couldn't succeed.

So here I'm - before I ask for a refund or replacement from the shop - asking you if there's a chance that they dont work because of the motherboard which could be somewhat older, or because of the bios, (latest is 2004), or if I'm missing something.

I've this doubt because if I plug them into a cheap usb docking station, Windows disk management can somehow see the drives (unkown) and size, it says they're not initialized but if I try to initialize them it gives a crc error but at this point I dont know I get this error because of the cheap docking station or due to the HDs.

I'm quite lost, both dead on arrival? What do you think?
Thank you

**(1802 it's the latest bios it downloaded from UEFI, maybe because my board is the Call of Duty edition but that shouldnt matter, havent tried to let it search for other updtes, I'm aware there's also ver. 2004 but apparently that's for the non CoD edition of the board although they're the very same)

EDIT:
It was the hard disks all along, both arrived dead. Bought another identical from a different seller and totally works fine.

[_Luca_]

Well... if I plug them into the docking station, althought I cant initialize them, the WD dashboard says they have 10k and 14k power on hours .... guess it's not good at all. 

*Edit: Looks like WD's Dashboard populate the view with the previously checked HD data if it cant retrive that data from the hd, so can't say they're used..

[Murph_9000]

Are these supposed to be brand new drives, or are they random used drives?

If they are used, they might have some odd configuration (e.g. 520/528 byte blocks/sectors, rather than the standard 512/4096 bytes) from being used in an enterprise disk array.  I don't know if WD give out the low level tools to essentially do a factory reset on the configuration.  With some drives, it's possible to use special tools to turn drives with non-standard configuration back into normal drives.

[_Luca_]

New drives, came sealed, but WD's Dashboard can't really read the smart data so and those power on hours it pulled and I read are from other drives. It cant also run smart tests, probably because of the docking station but at least it reads serial, model and other info. Going to try again thru sata without all the other drives attached...

[Murph_9000]

Something you could be running into with the USB to SATA adapter is the cheaper ones tend to be more basic USB Mass Storage (UMS / MSC) devices.  There's also USB Attached SCSI devices (UAS / UASP), for SATA drives, which provide more of a native interface between the PC and the drive.  Both are physically USB on one side and SATA on the other side of the adapter, but use different protocols talking to the host PC.  UAS adapters should be able to do generic SMART stuff, although things like WD proprietary tools might get confused by the different attachment method.

If memory serves, some of the very cheap USB to SATA adapters historically cheated and could only do 32 bits of addressing within the LBA48 used by SATA, limiting them to 2TB drives.  I don't know if you're likely to find any of those still being sold today.

It really shouldn't be a BIOS thing, as SATA has been a very stable standard for a long time, and LBA48 allows up to 128PB drives with 512 byte blocks/sectors (or 1EB with 4096 byte blocks).

[_Luca_]

Thank you, I also suspect it's not the bios at all, I've just updated it to the latest 2004 but nothing changed (got ReBAR tho).

Both drives do spin up but can't hear any other movement, the only clicking noise does happen when trying to start windows (it slows it down) and it's kinda of a soft double click every 3 seconds but nothing else.

I also thought of the PWDIS feature but it's not the case either as this model doesnt have it (WUH721818ALE6L4 , fw680).
Saturday I'll test them on a friend's computer who also happen to have a couple of old docking stations but I'm very skeptical, I'm afraid that they're somehow both faulty.

I've meanwhile orderer another identical from a different seller to see how it goes.

[_Luca_ · Accepted solution]

Those 2 hard disks both arrived dead. Bought another identical from a different seller and it works fine. In comparison of the one that works, the 2 broken ones sounded and were spinning like a Boeing turbine and I thought it was their normal sound.