Antony D'Emanuele

Q: Can I use 6TB drives in a Mid 2012 Mac Pro Server?

I want to consolidate a couple of servers on to a Mac Pro Server. I plan to use one drive to store the data and the others as backup (simple clones). Will 6TB hard drives work with the Mid 2012 Mac Pro?

Posted on Jun 26, 2016 3:29 AM

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Q: Can I use 6TB drives in a Mid 2012 Mac Pro Server?

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  • by lllaass,Helpful

    lllaass lllaass Jun 26, 2016 3:55 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele
    Level 10 (189,016 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 26, 2016 3:55 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele

    Yes with the following conditions:

    - There is a bug in OSX 10.8.4 and later that prevents formatting internal drivers larger than 2.2 GB.

    That bug appeared in 10.8.4, and has not yet been fixed. You can

    using a Disk Utility from any older Mac OS X, Your Mac originally can with 10.7.3, 10.8 or 10.8.3 and thus the 10.6 DVD and thus will not work

    Another work-around is to move that drive to an external enclosure and Erase it there (provided your enclosure is modern enough to deal with drives over 2.2TB.

    • When you ERASE a drive over 2.2TB in an Internal Drive bay, it is given the Logical Volume stuff in Mac OS X 10.8.3 and later. Many readers here considered that a BUG. Logical Volume Group partitions were not needed, and interfered with re-ERASE and other functions. There are several wildly different work arounds:

    • Re-ERASE in an external enclosure, provided your can accommodate drives over 2.2TB (really old ones can not).
    • Re-ERASE using Mac OS X or Recovery_HD or Installer the predates 10.8.3
    • Manually delete the Logical Volume group partitions using Terminal.

     

    - For Internal sled mounting:

    The screw-depth penetration for 'bottom-mounting screws adjacent to the platters' on some drives over 3TB have been shortened. This may mean that the sled screws bottom out before they fit snugly and begin to compress the washers on the sled. If this is the case, your drive will not sit flat on the sled, and will not mate with the backplane connector without additional adjustment.

    OWC also now sells sleds that uses alternate mounting holes in the HD to avoid that problem.

    You can shorten those screws, or put a washer under the heads to ensure they can be made snug in the allowed depth. Also, now OWC/Macsales now sells sleds that use the alternate mounting screw locations to avoid this problem. However, these sleds are only for the 2009 and later Pros

  • by Antony D'Emanuele,

    Antony D'Emanuele Antony D'Emanuele Jun 26, 2016 3:55 AM in response to lllaass
    Level 2 (312 points)
    Apple TV
    Jun 26, 2016 3:55 AM in response to lllaass

    Thanks for detailed answer.

     

    I have 10.7.5 and was planning to upgrade to latest OS X once I had the drives. From what I understand, I should be able to format the 6TB drives with 10.7.5 and simply upgrade OS X afterwards?

     

    Do we know whether Apple are planning to resolve bug, seems bizarre that it has been there since 10.8.4 and we are now at 10.11.5

     

    I am looking at WD NAS 6TB drives, am I right in understanding that I may have issues fitting into the Mac Pro? Is it just a case of putting a washer under the screw heads?

  • by Antony D'Emanuele,

    Antony D'Emanuele Antony D'Emanuele Jun 26, 2016 4:06 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele
    Level 2 (312 points)
    Apple TV
    Jun 26, 2016 4:06 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele

    One other thought, is there a way of formatting using Terminal that gets around the bug in the latest OS X?

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 26, 2016 7:52 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele
    Level 9 (60,976 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 26, 2016 7:52 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele

    If you can just use the PARTITION Commands, and stay away from ERASE, you will have no problem.

     

    If you use ERASE, the drives will be ERASED, but the problem is that this will also create Logical Volume Groups on the drive. This works great for smaller drives and is whole-drive encryption ready. The rest of the Utilities cannot deal with a drive so large with Logical Volume Groups, so after using ERASE the drive cannot be partitioned.

     

    Terminal commands using diskutil could be used, but there are no protections against erasing the wrong drive by mistake.

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jun 26, 2016 1:34 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder
    Level 9 (60,976 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 26, 2016 1:34 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

    Terminal commands would be:

     

    >> get a list of drives available and their designators:

    diskutil list

     

    >> erase the specified disk, create the default GUID partition map and create one HFS plus (journaled) partition named "Untitled 1":

    diskutil erasedisk  JHFS+ "Untitled 1" <disk_designator>

    where <disk_designator> can be a name like disk3, taken from the 'diskutil list' command just executed.

    It would be prudent to remove all other drives except the Boot Drive, which is protected and will NOT be erased. Remember when you do this the names disk1 disk2 disk3 are DYNAMIC and assigned at Startup, so you must refer to the 'diskutil list' you just issued.

  • by Antony D'Emanuele,

    Antony D'Emanuele Antony D'Emanuele Jul 17, 2016 12:31 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder
    Level 2 (312 points)
    Apple TV
    Jul 17, 2016 12:31 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

    So if I insert the new 6TB drive I would be OK if I just used the partition command in Disk Utility? Does this automatically format the drive correctly for Mac OS X?

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Jul 17, 2016 7:55 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele
    Level 9 (60,976 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 17, 2016 7:55 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele

    It should if you deliberately choose 1 partition off its list (rather then saying "current partitioning", even if it is one partition).

  • by Christian Stueben,

    Christian Stueben Christian Stueben Jul 18, 2016 7:35 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele
    Level 1 (120 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 18, 2016 7:35 AM in response to Antony D'Emanuele

    In my mac pro 5.1 / 2010 i have sucessfully installed a 8tb disk as osx 10.11 startup device.

     

    But not at the first try.

     

    At first i had installed osx 10.8 on the 8tb drive. Success. Then the online update to el capitan. No success, allways  somewhere in the update process a "cannot install".

     

    Second try. I took an old 2tb drive, installed 10.8 onto it. Success. Then i made the online update to el capitan, targeting it to the 8 tb. Success!

     

    Now it runs stable and reliable osx 10.11.5.

     

    Greetings from gemany

    Chris

     

     

    ( I dont want to know what oddities will occur when the update to 10.12 must be done )