Seagate 1TB Drive Will Not Work With ECS KT600-A Mobo

[BraveSirRobbin]

I wanted to post this in the Motherboards forum in case someone else runs into a similar situation. I had two SATA drives working with an ECS KT600-A motherboard (both under 300 GB) and wanted to replace one with a new Seagate 1TB drive from Frys. It would sometimes be recognized by the system (SATA post after main Bios post) and sometimes not (system would just freeze and show no devices found). It was driving me crazy as when it DID get recognized, I could perform a full format on it via Windows XP Pro.

I tried everything (new cable, swap to primary, etc...) including trying the hard drive in another system (which showed it working properly). I had the speed jumper set to 150 gb/sec (since that was the posted supporting SATA speed per the manuel). I then wrote to ECS tech support.

Well, just in case some other poor soul tries to get a Seagate 1TB drive going with this ECS KT600-A motherboard, here is a reply from ECS technical support when asked if this was possible.

This motherboard will not support any HDD above 200-300GB. There are hardware specifically chipset limitations.

I thought this was a weird response as SATA was not supposed to have these (size) limitations. Speed maybe (depending on age/type of mobo) but not size.

 

[tcsenter]

The latest BIOS (and SATA option ROM) for the KT600-A is dated 2004. You're pretty much not going to get any mainboard to support a drive capacity that would not exist for another four years after the latest BIOS build. Boards that receive a final BIOS in 2008 will not be supporting whatever the largest drive is in 2012.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

I see your point, and if this is the case it would be nice if that size limitation is stated with the motherboard's specification listing (i.e. supports hard drives up to xxx TB/GB).

For instance I did know not to try the 300gb/sec speed (left the jumper installed) as the SATA spec stated "up to 150 gb/sec" in the specifications.

 

[tcsenter]

Well ECS does have a 'relevant supports' entry for KT600-A, though its not very easy to find:

Model: KT600-A
MAX. HDD Support: 400GB

However, I've seen reports of problems even with 400GB on KT600-A (I built several systems with this board though none used disks larger than 160GB). Up to 300GB should be fine.

The problem with giving a maximum supported disk capacity is that they really don't know for sure just what capacity will start to trip-up the current BIOS geometry implementation. For the same reason it is not possible for any given BIOS to support all future drive geometries up to the theoretical spec limit, it is difficult to predict the actual limits of any given BIOS implementation.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Wow, I don't know how you found that info, but thanks for that link! Wish I found that before trying this out.