/Cool Story time:
I used to come here back in the early 2000's. Drifted away, and lately I've been bemoaning the lack of help I get on other, better-known forums like Reddit. I thought back to how many times ppl would pull solutions out of thin air in the past, and wondered where those days had gone. I dug back 12 years in my gmail acct to find the name of this board. I CANNOT believe you guys are still here! CRAZY respect for keeping on all these years!
/CSB time over

About a week back, I bought one of those Western Digital Easystore 8TB drives when they were on sale, as they had WD Red 8TB 256mb cache NAS drives in them. Big storage, high reliability, and the Easystores are much cheaper than if you bought a plain bare 8TB Red drive. Go figure. I bought it to shuck it and put it in my mid-tower case, as many have done. I've installed many HD's over the years, starting with my Commodore Amiga. I've built my own Windows systems since Win95. I'm not highly skilled, as I only install hardware for my system every 6-12 months, not like ppl who do this as a job or serious hobby, but I have a background. I play with hardware when my system needs upgrading.

I shucked it and installed it. First thing I noticed was that the holes on the bottom of the drive did not line up with the holes in the HDD caddy that came with my Nanoxia case. My 6-year-old WD Black drives fit it perfectly, but I could only get 2 of the 4 holes in the bottom of the Red to line up at the same time. Are they changing the standards? Really the LEAST of my problems, but it puzzled me and it's related, so I thought I'd ask.

I installed it and plugged it in, intending it for use as a data drive only. It didn't show up in device manager. I rebooted and it showed up. I formatted it. Transferred a few gigs of files. Seemed slower than I'd like. For one reason or another I eventually had to reboot. It took a full five minutes to shut down, instead of the few seconds it normally takes. When it started up again. the BIOS screen flashed, then it sat there for 15 minutes before I shut it down and gave up. I timed it after the shutdown issue.

I don't know what happened, but between it not showing up the first time, then my system not booting, I thought the drive wasn't getting along with my computer. I pulled the Red, put it back in the external enclosure and have been running it that way since. I've noticed some delays and system hiccups when I've been away from the computer awhile and come back to use it. The performance seems reasonable over the stock USB interface, no great shakes. A week later, things seem to be working fine except for the hiccups.

THE BIG QUESTION:

I thought I'd ask here if anyone had an idea why it didn't work as a data drive over the internal SATA 3 interface. Any thoughts? I suspect it may have to do with the BIOS and the age of the motherboard, but I CANNOT construct a search to find that info, all I get is a bunch of unwanted data. Would a PCIE board with SATA help, do you think? I'd LIKE to put it inside my big new case with the dozen free drive bays, where it would stay cooler, and possibly run faster. If it were internal, I think I could also avoid the hiccups and momentary freezes I've been getting since plugging it into my USB ports. Just seems better all the way around.

Thanks in advance. You kind of made my night just by still being here.

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HARDWARE & OS INFO
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⦁ i5-2500k

⦁ MSI P67A-C43 (B3) Motherboard

⦁ 12GB RAM- CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) (2x2GB), DDR3 1600, matched sets

⦁ Seasonic G Series 550W PS

⦁ Gigabyte GTX 960 4gb RAM Video card

⦁ A couple WD Caviar Black drives, and an SSD boot drive. The SSD is running off SATAIII, and I tried to run the WD RED off the other SATAIII
⦁ The other drives are running off the SATAII ports.

⦁ Windows 10 64-bit