Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

[canadaboy25]

Hey guys, I've got what I feel is a bit of a strange problem. I have a 1TB Toshiba sata hard drive that will not spin up when connected to a pc diectly with a sata cable. I've tried it in several different PC's and nothing happens. The drive does not spin up or make any noise at all and the pc doesn't detect it.

However, it will work absolutely fine when connected to a computer through a usb to sata converter.

The converter is actually the board that came from a seagate portable hard drive with a dead drive. Since it was a 2.5" drive and ran off usb, there was no 12 volt rail which is obviously required for a 3.5" drive. The small black relay in the picture is attached to the 5 volt line going to the drive so that when the usb is plugged in, it connects the external 12 volts (from a power supply) to the drive at the same time. This isn't really important just letting everyone know what was going on in the picture.

And yes I know the drive attached to the converter in the picture is a seagate. That was just the drive I was currently using when writing this.

I'm quite confused as to why my janky setup will make the drive work without issue but it refuses to spin up when attached directly to a pc.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

[goontron]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

I bet the drive's firmware listens for the "Drive enable" pin.

Try grounding pin 3 on that power connector.

[canadaboy25]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

I bet the drive's firmware listens for the "Drive enable" pin.

Try grounding pin 3 on that power connector.

According to that document the drive is enabled when there is no signal and disabled when there is 3.3 volts. I was plugged in through a molex to sata power cable so there was no 3.3 volts to be provided to the drive.

Another strange thing is that the drive will not spin up when connected to a non-pc input such as my wii or just straight into a 5v usb charger. The seagate drive will spin up and work with my wii through the same converter no problem and also spins up when just connected to the 5v usb wall charger.

The usb to sata converter doesn't even have pins in the fist 3 slots so there is no way it is feeding 3.3 volts to it either. Just for absolute certainty I did try shorting pin 3 of the drive to ground when it was plugged into power and not spinning but nothing happened.

The drive transfers at about 150mb/s through the usb 3 converter and seems to work perfectly when it is spinning.

I'm confused to say the least.

[stj]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

clarify.

is the drive SATA1, 2 OR 3?
same question for the pc and usb adapter.
i think i may know this one.

[canadaboy25]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

clarify.

is the drive SATA1, 2 OR 3?
same question for the pc and usb adapter.
i think i may know this one.

The Toshiba drive is pictured in the first post.

My pc is a Asus M5a99fx pro r2.0 board which I believe is sata 3

The usb adapter is salvaged from a Seagate Backup plus portable drive SRD0F1 That had a dead hard drive in it.

[stj]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

can you force the pc to use sata2?

[canadaboy25]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

can you force the pc to use sata2?

I don't believe so. There is no such setting in the bios and my motherboard manual makes no mention of such a setting.

[stj]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

i have seen issues where one side cant see the other side because the initial comms rates are incompatable.

upgrading ps3's is a good example, ps3 is sata1 - if you use a sata3 drive you better hope it has a jumper to force sata1/2 mode on it!!
some wd drives have a jumper to force the drive into a lower mode.

going the other way is obviously not so easy - if your motherboard cant query the bus at 150/300 speed then the drive cant respond.

[Stefan Payne]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

upgrading ps3's is a good example, ps3 is sata1 - if you use a sata3 drive you better hope it has a jumper to force sata1/2 mode on it!!
some wd drives have a jumper to force the drive into a lower mode.

Can#t confirm that for my CECH-2104A Slim, wich at one point had a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO in there, right now there is a 500GB Seagate Slim Laptop Drive, wich probably is SATA3...

[Stefan Payne]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

Korrection, the 500GB Seagate is only SATA 3Gb/sec, according to the Receit:

That's the one I use in my Slim:
500GB Seagate Laptop Thin HDD ST500LT012 16MB 2.5" (6.4cm) SATA 3Gb/s

BUT: the Samsung 850 EVO SSD is S-ATA 6Gbit/sec...

[stj]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

well 3Gb is sata2, the ssd is sata3

[canadaboy25]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

Reading through my original post I realized that I forgot to include the fact that when I originally salvaged the drive from a discarded PVR, I plugged it directly into my PC and it seemed to be working fine. I deleted the factory partitions from the drive and then my computer locked up and after reboot I could not access the drive directly again.

[SMDFlea]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

To use SATA 3 on your motherboard you need to connect to the grey sata ports.The HD has an Advanced Format (AF) 512e Sector Length https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/...01abaxxxv.html

Your usb drive can use the drive because of its chipset emulation.

https://superuser.com/questions/1271...sb-controllers

Edit: if you use win xp https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/...ed-format.html

[kc8adu]

Re: Hard drive wont spin up unless connected by usb

probably set for power up in standby.
several utils out there to remove it.