[ale] SATA drive not recognized by BIOS

[Steve Tynor]

Before I drive back to Microcenter _again_, I'll try asking the group if 
you have any ideas for something I should try.

One of the drives in my LVM RAID1 array started spewing errors to 
/var/log/syslog.    The drives are about 5 years old, so out of caution, 
I decided to replace both rather than just the one.    I thought I'd 
take the opportunity to increase the storage size since larger drives 
are pretty cost competitive now.

     OLD Drives:  WD Red NAS 4TB

     NEW Drives (first attempt): Toshiba N300 NAS 8TB

I failed and removed the bad drive from the array, shutdown, swapped one 
of the new drives in for the old drive and...

The BIOS does not recognize the new drive. Tried swapping SATA cables, 
power cables - nothing.  Old drive works with all cables; new drive 
fails to work with any combo.

I could not find any documentation or internet commentary to suggest a 
BIOS size limitation, but I could not think of any other reason for the 
problem.  (FWIW:  Dell Precision T1700)

So I took the drives back to Microcenter and exchanged them for 4TB variants

     NEW Drives (second attempt): Toshiba N300 NAS 4TB

and...  They ALSO aren't seen by the BIOS.  (same attempt to swap around 
cables, same failure to get the new drive seen).  All 4 SATA ports are 
enabled by the BIOS - and the old drive shows up no matter which port I 
plug it into.

Both the old and new drives a 6Gb/s SATA III drives and are advertised 
as 4TB capacity.   I don't see any reason one would work and the other 
wouldn't.


So..  Before I drive back to Microcenter and try to buy WD branded 
drives (which seem like an insane solution), I'm hoping someone on the 
list will have an idea of something I may not have tried ...?

Thanks!
Steve