How to format a WD Red Plus 6TB NAS HDD drive as an external drive for Mac

[Max xk285]

Hi.

I just bought a WD Red Plus 6TB NAS drive. My intention is to use it as a normal storage disk with my MacBook Pro using an adapter to USB. I chose a NAS drive as they are supposed to have a superior build to "normal" drives. They for example include sensors to sense shaking in order to avoid damage to the writing heads. I am not interested in using it as a NAS drive, just as a storage drive.

I have other 3.5" disk from Samsung which I could format with Macs Extended Journal File Format while connected to my Mac.

When I connect the WD drive to my Mac, it won't recognize it, neither in Disk Utility nor using the diskutil list command in terminal.

I connected the disk to a Windows PC. There, in the disk manager, the disk was shown. The disk space was not allocated when first connected, I allocated it and now it shows as an NTFS drive.

My Mac, however will still not recognize the drive.

Has anybody an idea how I could make my Mac recognize the disk, so I can change the file format to Extended Journal File Format?

See the image for the set up.

Any other comments are appreciated.

Thanks beforehand

Max

 

[Max_G]

Maybe you can format it as exFat on PC and then connect it to your Mac and see if you can reformat it.

 

[chrfr]

Hi.

I just bought a WD Red Plus 6TB NAS drive. My intention is to use it as a normal storage disk with my MacBook Pro using an adapter to USB. I chose a NAS drive as they are supposed to have a superior build to "normal" drives. They for example include sensors to sense shaking in order to avoid damage to the writing heads. I am not interested in using it as a NAS drive, just as a storage drive.

I have other 3.5" disk from Samsung which I could format with Macs Extended Journal File Format while connected to my Mac.

When I connect the WD drive to my Mac, it won't recognize it, neither in Disk Utility nor using the diskutil list command in terminal.

I connected the disk to a Windows PC. There, in the disk manager, the disk was shown. The disk space was not allocated when first connected, I allocated it and now it shows as an NTFS drive.

My Mac, however will still not recognize the drive.

Has anybody an idea how I could make my Mac recognize the disk, so I can change the file format to Extended Journal File Format?

See the image for the set up.

Any other comments are appreciated.

Thanks beforehand

Max

Are you sure that your SATA adapter works with a Mac?
Also, make sure that you have the "Show all Devices" option selected in Disk Utility's View menu. While a Mac can't, by default, write to an NTFS disk, it should read from it without a problem.

 

[UbuntuFu]

^ Yeah, that SATA adapter looks sketchy. I also had one like that from eons ago for my Windows PC, my mac wouldn't work with it. I replaced it with a new SATA docking station.

 

[jav6454]

Why not get an HDD enclosure and then try to reformat it? Also, GOLD drives from WD are more resilient than RED due the segment GOLD drives services (Servers with RAID).

 

[SpotOnT]

As others have said, my money is on the SATA connection not working with Mac. Disk Utility should be able to see the drive no matter how it is formatted.

 

[Max xk285]

Hej. Thanks for the replies. Yeah, the adapter might be the problem afterall. I’ll get a new enclosure and get back here whether it works or not!

 

[jav6454]

With an enclosure it will likely work.

 

[Max xk285]

Hi again.
I got an enclosure and now the disc shows up just fine.
Thanks again for the advice. Very happy now 😀