Q: 4 TB Hard drive formatting default to Logical Volume Group
Hi All,
I have a 2009 Mac Pro and recently switched my hard drives around. I have an SSD in the lower drive bay below the DVD drive. I had a primary data drive in bay 1, a 2 tb Time Machine drive in bay 2, and 2 (1 TB) drives in Bays 3 and 4 working in Raid 0.
I bought a Seagate 4 TB drive (the 5900 rpm one) and took out the 2 RAID drives and the 1 TB data drive. My configuration now is, SSD in lower bay, 4 TB in bay 1, and 2 TB time machine in Bay 2.
Everything is working ok, but I can't figure out why when I initialized the 4 TB drive it defaulted to a Logical Volume Group. I am not sure if this is actually a problem, or something with above 2 TB drives in Mountain Lion. Anyone know why it is working this way? My SSD and 2 TB drive show Partition info and physical drive location in the Mac Pro, but the 4 TB doesn't even say it's a Seagate or show the model number and location. Just wanted to find out.
By the way, I had a difficult time putting the Seagate drive in bay 1. The connector kept hanging on something, and I ended up chipping away some plastic on the seagate connector to make it fit. I am mainly a WD buyer, so I took a chance on the Seagate this time.
Mac Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), (Nehalem)
Posted on Jul 2, 2013 4:48 PM
Okay, so I did this, and the drive showed up in Disk Utility with the serial number and brand. It showed which bay it was in and everything like I would have expected at first. Unfortunately, when I go to format it, like normal with 1 partition, it says formatting, and then creating CoreStorage Volume. So, apparently it is going to do that no matter what I do.
I called Apple, and after talking to 3 people, I was told that my 2009 model does not officially support more than a 2 TB drive in any of the drive bays. They said that even though it was working through CoreStorage, that it wouldn't be reliable above 2 TB. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but apparently this isn't going to work out for me. I guess I will settle with 2 TB for now and get a new Mac Pro later this year. =(
Posted on Jul 3, 2013 5:32 PM