My UDM SE can fit various hard drives. Ubiquiti have decided to have a cool tray the hard drive snaps into & slides into the UDM, which also means you have to have a very good fit. As it turns out, the fit may not be good enough without shimming the drive out!
I used a Seagate Skyhawk 4TB Video 3.5 Inch SATA (ST4000VXZ16/ST4000VX016) drive, which is reported as being compatible. In sliding the drive in there was no spin-up sound. I then tried rebooting it & repositioning the drive several times, it wasn’t clear if the hot-swap should work or not. But there was never a spin-up sound or a LED flashing on. Very annoying, especially if you are rebooting your houses internet for a “5 min project”!
The fundamental problem is that the hard drive must mate perfectly with the internal SATA connectors. I found my drive had a tiny gap at the end – you could slide the drive back and forth 0.5-1mm:
The solution was to fit a shim at the front – I used a piece of folded up sandpaper as it was lying closest to me, a popcan would be better probably:
Now look at the gap at the back, you’ll see it’s closed up:
With this, the drive can be inserted. I inserted it powered on & immediately heard the sound of the drive spinning up followed by the LED flashing a few times. The drive shortly appeared as being detected in the management GUI – it took a bit longer to be ready (& I reformatted anyway), but the spin-up, LED, and detection should be very quick.
If you are not get the drive spinning up sound, I’d check if there is a mechanical issue before looking into drive compatibility. No amount of pushing on the front got the drive to mate, but adding the shim worked right away.
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