Using a 6TB WD Red inside a PC

I’ve been going round in circles trying to contact WD but I can’t phone the number given using a mobile which is all I have and when I try to ask a question within the knowledge base all I’m getting is an error so hopefully someone here can kindly advise me.

I am looking to buy one of the new 6TB drives for use in my desktop PC running Windows 7 Ultimate.

Because I have my PC switched on 24/7 I would rather have the extra reliability of one of the red drives than going for the green version.   Since reds are supposed to be designed for NAS enclosures rather than PC’s I would like to ask if it will still be OK to use inside a normal PC?

Thank you in advance.

Hi the Red drive will work fine. But to run a 6TB drive as a boot drive your motherboard has to have uefi bios also windows needs to be 64 bit. So as long as your bios finds the drive it should be ok.

Thank you Hammey, that’s all I needed to know.

I am running 64bit Win7 although I don’t have UEFI BIOS, but this is not going to be my boot drive, just an extra storage drive.   I already also have another 3TB storage drive in my PC which BIOS and Windows found very easily and immediately showed the full capacity available so I’m pretty sure it should do the same and work on the new drive as well.

Thank you so much for replying.   I can go ahead and order it now. :smiley_cat:

Hi Guys,

I am going in circles trying to get my 6TB WD Red to work. It just shows as a 2TB drive in server 2008 and 20012 also windows 8.1. I don’t have UEFI option on the server 2008 box but the 8.1 box doesn’t find the boot device if I change to UEFI. I have it as a GPT drive  but am stuck trying to make it read at full capacity. I am not trying to boot to this drive just extra storage.

Any help would be appreciated.

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Yes - I have the same problem, but with a 4 tb. I bood from a wd green 2 tb drive, I have win 7 sp1 32 bit - I have a 3 tb wd red working a GPT and I added as storage a wd green _4TB_ drive - only to have it seen as 2 TB. Still waiting for customer support to get back to me on this one. going in circles as u say… 

Yes, I also have the same problem with a 3TB Red. It is only showing 2TB.

I also have made sure it is GPT. I have tried it on Windows 7.1, 8.1 and also Linux (Debian). It was purchased as part of a batch of 4 and the other 3 work fine so I am sure it is nothing to do with BIOS or OS.

Anyone got any suggestions? In my case the only thing I can think of is the disk although purchased ‘new’ seems to have been used previously as an ‘active’ windows bootable drive. It was purchased as a bath of 4, one of which was not sealed in an anti-static bag but of course now I do not know which one.  I have been trying to re-partion with various tools and that is when I noticed there was a pre-existing windows partition. I simply deleted the partitions and assumed that the 3TB would be available.

Have these difficult cases got something to do with this? Is there still a ‘hidden’ windows MBR? Anyone know of a utility to take the disk back to factory default? It doesn’t matter if it is destructive I just want the 3TB. I have tried a lot of things, diskpart, easeUS, partition wizard. Nothing works.