Hitachi 7K1000 not working/not formatting, [Mavericks / Early 2011 MBP/ OptiBay Caddy

Hey folks, dealing with an issue regarding a Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 2.5 drive. Been messaging back and forth with the guys that I purchased this off on ebay.
I've sent the drive back for inspection and they claim that the drive is in working order and they're prepared to send it back to me.
Unfortunately for me, when I had installed the drive into my Macbook Pro laptop, the drive showed up on Disk Utilities but failed to format as a MacOS drive saying Drive could not be initialized.
During reboot, it says Drive not recognized or something like that.

Currently, I'm in the middle of asking for a refund but they're pushing me to get them to send it back including a small postage fee.
I'm worried that it would be more than likely that once I retrieve it, it won't work.
Also, a refund would apparently cost me %25 of what I paid for.

I've received a free new replacement caddy which also didn't work.
The drive didn't work on another MBP when I plugged it in using an SATA to USB converter
I'm running the latest Mavericks.
What should I do!?!?!?

I've also just been reading about people having issues regarding different SATA speeds.
Apparently one user had no trouble with the Travelstar 7K1000 installed within the original bay.
The problem is, when I've swapped the drives around, my laptop wouldn't boot.
If the possible solution would be to have the hybrid ssd hdd on the optical bay caddy and the hitachi 1tb hdd on the original hdd bay, how would I get it to boot plus keeping the original files etc?

If you can't format the drive and the drive is not even recognized when using a SATA to USB converter, it's time to get a refund from whoever you bought it from. Don't mess with it any more. If you paid for the drive with PayPal, file a complaint if they want to charge you a re-stocking fee for the return. And in the future, stay away from eBay resellers. There are lots of great places to buy a hard drive from: Amazon, NewEgg, OWC, etc.

chscag said:

If you can't format the drive and the drive is not even recognized when using a SATA to USB converter, it's time to get a refund from whoever you bought it from. Don't mess with it any more. If you paid for the drive with PayPal, file a complaint if they want to charge you a re-stocking fee for the return. And in the future, stay away from eBay resellers. There are lots of great places to buy a hard drive from: Amazon, NewEgg, OWC, etc.

Click to expand...

Well the guys that I sold it from were kind to help, although they didn't match my exact criteria of installation they proved that the drive was functional
Heres a clip of them installing Snow Leopard on the drive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti0OuPO6h-g

I've messaged them and I've already said that I'll take it back for an additional 9$ postage fee to try to format the drive using recovery whilst on the original hdd bay and swap it back around.

If they were to refund me they would have to take off 25% and stock it as a used drive.

Edit: I'm from australia by the way so those sites such as amazon aren't directly accessible to us

just for those who are interested, I've found a solution with the help from the guys at Hitachi.
they suggested that the macbook pro won't be able to run the drive at full 6gbps speed and that I'd have to manually slow it down using a windows based dos program.

here's a detailed walk through copied from the email I got:

> > Thank you for contacting HGST Technical Support.
> >
> > Regarding your hard drive, if you'd like to use it as an external drive, please connect it to your computer via the SATA-to-USB adapter then use the steps in the pdf document attached below to format the drive.
> >
> > Our internal hard drives are not pre-formatted thus would not appear in the desktop at first. After the format process is completed, if the drive icon doesn't appear, unplug the drive then connect it again.
> >
> >
> > If you need to install the hard drive into the optical bay, the transfer speed of the drive may have to be lowered to 3.0Gb/s first. I heard this suggestion from some Mac users.
> >
> > We have a software called HDDFT that can change the transfer speed however it is a DOS based software and the hard drive has to be installed onto a system that supports SATA 6Gb/s transfer speed. After the change is made, the hard drive can be installed onto a different system.
> >
> > If you'd like to try the software, follow these steps:
> >
> > 1) Use your CD-Writer Software (e.g. Nero) to make a bootable CD-R using the iso file attached.
> >
> > 2) After that's done, power up a PC with the CD-R in it. HDDFT will run automatically. If it doesn't, check the BIOS and make sure the CD/DVD drive is the first in the boot priority.
> >
> > 3) After HDDFT is loaded, it'd present you a black screen with the following options
> >
> > Esc: Quit
> > F1: Switch to another drive
> > F2: Change Transfer Speed to 1.5Gb/s
> > F3 Change Transfer Speed to 3.0Gb/s
> > F4: Change Transfer Speed to 6.0Gb/s
> > F5: Enable SSC (Spread Spectrum Clocking)
> > F6: Disable SSC
> >
> > 4) Check whether the correct SATA drive is selected by the program. If it's selecting a different drive, press F1 once or until it selects the correct drive.
> >
> > 5) After the transfer speed is switched to 3GB/s, the program will prompt you to power off then restart the computer. This step must be followed.

That's an awful lot of trouble and expense for a drive that can't perform as advertised. You should have taken our advice above and got a refund from the seller. Anyway, thanks for posting the info from Hitachi.

just out of curiousity, does 6gbps SATA actually work within a caddy ?

Shouldn't the HDD automatically throttle to 3GB/s? Backward compatible always...

Some do and some do not. Ask for your money back.