Hard disks not showing up?

[DirtyDane]

Hi there! Its been some time, but I'm currently stumped. So i do photography as a hobby and as such i need quite a bit of storage. not a big issue right? just plop another drive in no problem. well My issue seems to be in that of the 5 SATA devices i have only certain ones will show up based on what is currently plugged in. At no one point can I get both the disk drives and all 3 storage drives to show up. the 1 SSD which is my boot device shows up no problem. But my 1 3TB WD Blue hard disk seems to have trouble showing up via anything but the UEFI. It will show up if i turn off the power supply, unplug both of the disk drives or  the other 3TB hard disk i use for my steam library (the drives are identical except the steam drive has a higher RPM) and plug both hard disks in  then they will show up. but as soon as i turn the power supply off and plug the other two disk drives in it wont show up. I have attempted to use the drive via USB adapter but it will not show up nor will it even spin if i do that. This drive is good as i can get it to show up and be usable (the previous drive i hadnt figured out that leaving everyting unplugged allowed it to work so i wound up RMAing a drive with all of my photos EVER on it. fun day to recover them all from my backup drive that i keep outside the system.) Anyways I question two things as possible factors for my issue.

A. the power supply may not be able to handle that many devices as well as the rest of the system hardware.  and  

B. the motherboard might have a limitation of some sort. but this one makes the least sense as at one point i had an set of 4 drives in this system totalling 9.5 TB of storage.

 

Anyways i should probably list specs below. and just comment if you need any more information. its incredibly late so im just quickly typing this up to get it out and avoid procrastination.

 

CPU: I5-4460 3.2GHz  4 core

MOBO: ASRock -H97 Anniversairy ATX LGA1150

RAM: 16GB 4x4GB DDR3-1600 crucial

Storage drives: Samsung 850 EVO 250GB

                      2x    3TB WD blue

Graphing card: Asus -GeForce GTX 750Ti 2GB 

PSU: EVGA 500W 80+ cert

NIC: Gigabyte - GC-WB867D-I pci express x1 802.11a/b/g/n/ac wi-fi adapter

Optical drives: Asus DRW-DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer

                         Asus - BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer

 

 

and then i have a pretty much every usb port in use by something.

 

 

Thanks for any help any of you kind patient folk can offer. Honestly ive been at this one for months with no luck. im probably overlooking something simple here.

[Syncrosys]

What about swapping all your Sata cables? And do you have a friend or another system to test the drives?

 

I have a funny feeling your motherboard is fucking with you. Do a BIOS update if possible.

[DirtyDane]

1 hour ago, Syncrosys said:

What about swapping all your Sata cables? And do you have a friend or another system to test the drives?

 

I have a funny feeling your motherboard is fucking with you. Do a BIOS update if possible.

Ive tested the drives individually and they seem to work fine. i will check the mobo manufacturer site tonight to see if they have an update. never attempted a bios update before so this could be fun. i have tried moving the cables around as well as the ports they are connected to on both ends and i have pretty much the same results regardless. 

 

Will update later with results of the test. Thanks!

[JacobFW]

How many of these drives are internal / external / in external enclosures? 

Do you have anything plugged into an M.2 / ESata port on your motherboard?  Most motherboards will disable some sata ports if you have anything plugged into one of those.

Try connecting them all and then run CrystalDiskInfo.  Even if all the drives don't show up in windows, can Crystal see them?

 

I second Syncrosys' recommendation for a BIOS update.

 

Your power supply should be good enough.  I ran your system through the power supply calculator and came up with 300w.  Even taking into account the higher power draw during spin up, that should be enough.  If you have all or most of the drives coming off a single cable from your power supply, try using more.  That might distribute the load a little easier.

[DirtyDane]

My board doesnt support m.2  and all of the drives are internal.. what is crystal disk info? 

[DirtyDane]

Okay question. I found on their site a utility simply named 3TB unlocker and its under the list of programs for my motherbaord. should i do some research into that as well just to be safe?