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Problem formatting 4TB HDD in Mac Pro 5.1

B

bin90a

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 10, 2014
37
1
Melbourne, Australia
Been quiet recently on further upgrades to my 5.1 until yesterday, needed to install more storage, so in with a stock WD 4TB Black in a sled (had previously done CPU, RAM, PCIE SSD and USB3)

Running Mavericks, disk utility recognised it ok, but when I came to erase and partition, the drive type disappeared, partition options disappeared and it appeared to be formatted as a logical volume group. Then I couldn't seem to do anything further with it, the partition name was visible on the list, but that was all. Then found that Finder couldn't find it.

Tried to reformat with some third party disk utility software by Stellar, but it said the drive was encrypted and wouldn't touch it. Eventually had to take the drive out, put it in an external case and reformat on a windows machine, then back in the MP and reformatted it with the third party software. Now seems ok, 4TB single partition, appears normally in Finder and it's working ok.

Have seen a couple of references to issues with large drives but does the current OSX coupled with a machine originally setup with 1TB drives or maybe 2TB at a pinch, have issues with >2TB? Anyone else come across similar issues. HDD are now available in 6TB of course, so that might be pushing the friendship :D
 
I have a WD 4T RED in my 4,1 (flashed 5,1), no problem at all. I can partition it, run in RAID 0, zero issue so far.
 
I currently have a 4TB Seagate and 6TB WD Red hard drives in my 2012 5,1 Mac Pro with no problems. I also have a Velocity Solo x2 and Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro (RAID-0) both loaded with SSDs. There is also a Crucial M4 SSD in the optical bay, so there is no problem with the SSD/Hard Disk interacting with each other. Also have the 4-port USB 3.0 PCIe card installed. All partitioned and formatted normally with Disk Utility.

Previously was running 3 ea. 4TB Seagate in a RAID-5 using SoftRAID with no issues.

Good luck finding your problem....
 
bin90a said:
Been quiet recently on further upgrades to my 5.1 until yesterday, needed to install more storage, so in with a stock WD 4TB Black in a sled (had previously done CPU, RAM, PCIE SSD and USB3)

Running Mavericks, disk utility recognised it ok, but when I came to erase and partition, the drive type disappeared, partition options disappeared and it appeared to be formatted as a logical volume group. Then I couldn't seem to do anything further with it, the partition name was visible on the list, but that was all. Then found that Finder couldn't find it.

Tried to reformat with some third party disk utility software by Stellar, but it said the drive was encrypted and wouldn't touch it. Eventually had to take the drive out, put it in an external case and reformat on a windows machine, then back in the MP and reformatted it with the third party software. Now seems ok, 4TB single partition, appears normally in Finder and it's working ok.

Have seen a couple of references to issues with large drives but does the current OSX coupled with a machine originally setup with 1TB drives or maybe 2TB at a pinch, have issues with >2TB? Anyone else come across similar issues. HDD are now available in 6TB of course, so that might be pushing the friendship :D
Click to expand...
HFS+ can handle a maximum volume and file size of 8 exabytes. So 4Tb are NOT an issue.
I have found Mavericks and now Yosemite insist on setting everything up with CoreStorage. This can give unpredictable results and hamper backward capability on volumes that are not used to boot Mavericks or Yosemite.
I have a small Snow Leopard partition on my system that I can use to manage partitions the old fashioned way.
I have 4x4TB drives on my sleds without trouble. Two additional SSDs are controlled by an internal FASTA-6GU3-Pro card with a DX4 frame for mounting. One of them is fused to a 4TB drive for a 5TB Fusion drive, the other boots Windows.
All of this has worked without trouble.

----------
bin90a said:
Have seen a couple of references to issues with large drives but does the current OSX coupled with a machine originally setup with 1TB drives or maybe 2TB at a pinch, have issues with >2TB? Anyone else come across similar issues. HDD are now available in 6TB of course, so that might be pushing the friendship :D
Click to expand...
I should mention there is an issue with (some?) Linux drivers that only allow 2TB max for mounting Mac drives. This limit was imposed due to their instability with larger sizes.
 
Disk utility did set the disk up as core storage. I then couldn't do anything with it, not even access it with a Finder.

Anyway, having partitioned ok with Stellar Partition Manager, it's all good.
 
hfg said:
I currently have a 4TB Seagate and 6TB WD Red hard drives in my 2012 5,1 Mac Pro with no problems. I also have a Velocity Solo x2 and Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro (RAID-0) both loaded with SSDs. There is also a Crucial M4 SSD in the optical bay, so there is no problem with the SSD/Hard Disk interacting with each other. Also have the 4-port USB 3.0 PCIe card installed. All partitioned and formatted normally with Disk Utility.

Previously was running 3 ea. 4TB Seagate in a RAID-5 using SoftRAID with no issues.

Good luck finding your problem....
Click to expand...

Clearly you need more storage :D:D:D
 
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