SATA drive question

[RogerS]

I am not familiar with SATA drives. I bought one off eBay to go inside my Apple Time Capsule aka Time Machine. Essentially it is an enclosure with ethernet connectivity (amongst others). The normal sequence on power up is for the power light to go Green > Amber > Green and then all is working.

Sticking the new drive in, it goes Green > Amber > and then goes out.

As far as I can see power requirements are similar between the two drives but clearly there is something about the replacement SATA drive that makes the Time Capsule internal gubbins unhappy.

Any suggestions?

 

[kinsella]

Have you tried the drive in anything else, ie another computer. Is the disk SATA II? is it formatted? is it PC formated? A few questions to think about. ideally you need to reformat it. But clearly from the description you can't even get to that point as it fails. Is is brand new or used?
It still could be power compatability. i have a NETGEAR NAS and if i put in a new disk, it will not recognise the disk. I have to reset the machine with only the new disk within it. It will automatically format it. I can then add in the other drives and then add the new one.
Check the manual regarding adding new disks and formatting.

 

[RogerS]

Many thanks for the suggestions.

This is the drive in question. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 1316359290

And I replaced a 2008 Hitachi drive http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/te ... _final.pdf with the Seagate.

I am guessing it is not formatted but that shouldn't be a problem surely? There is the option in the Apple Airport Utility to erase aka format the drive...just not getting that far.

I see that the Hitahci is 3Gb/s and the Seagate 6Gb/s...is that an issue?

 

[kinsella]

Beyond my capabilities now i'm afraid i'll wait for a wood nerd to offer their services. But make sure you have the latest firmware on the storage device. i don't think its your harddisk. You probably have to do another sequence to make it work which is exactly what i had to do with the netgear.
You might try the Apple forum. Thats how i sorted my Netgear problem, i joined their forum and i had an answer within a few hours.

 

[RogerS]

Thanks for that. It's not a SATA 2/3 issue as they are backwards compatible.,,ie data rate is a red herring. I've ordered a USB enclosure so will try it in that. So much faffing about. Once upon a time when I had a goodly salary coming in I;d just have gone out and bought a new one.

The frustrating thing is that this all got kicked off by a Drive Genius background task flagging up on more than one occasion that the original drive had a fault. I ran a Drive Genius repair/rebuild option and it told me the drive was fine. So then i tried DiskWarrior and that told me I didn't have enough memory to finish the rebuild...even though I had 5Gb clear so go figure. Support from DiskWarrior is silent.

Doncha just love IT.

 

[RogerS]

I asked on the Apple forum. The new drive has a high spin-up speed....which sucks the life out of the old PSU. So it ain't ever going to work.

 

[petermillard]

I asked on the Apple forum. The new drive has a high spin-up speed....which sucks the life out of the old PSU. So it ain't ever going to work.

Pretty sure all the original Time Capsule drives were 7200 RPM (and easy enough to check ) so I wouldn't have thought that's the issue tbh. If you still have a USB enclosure/caddy on the way, an interesting experiment might be to hang the USB drive off the back of the TC and see if it works that way?

How old is your TC, btw? The power supplies were a bit 'delicate' in the early models, and I think there was a replacement program on some of the 500Gb units a few years back.

HTH Pete

 

[RogerS]

It's a first or second generation. The power supply is fine as it quite happily drives the original disk. The thread on the Apple forum is here if you are interested.

 

[petermillard]

Ah, OK, thanks - I missed the critical 'spin-up speed' part As noted in the other thread and above, still worth trying the new HDD in a USB enclosure on the back of your TC.

Let us know how it goes. P

 

[RogerS]

The hard disc enclosure arrived. you need to have one with an external power supply. Connecting the drive up to the usb port on the time capsule does not let it appear anywhere. This is because the drive is unformatted connecting the hard drive enclosure to usb port hub made the drive visible to the operating system giving you the option to format it. Once that has been done you can re connect it to the usb port on the time capsule. Fire up time machine a couple of times until the drive is recognised and you can then select it as your backup disc. This creates a brand new time machine backup so it'll take a long time as it will need to backup entire drive again the advantage of course is that you still got the other drive with an earlier version of time machine backup if you need it

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