There is a bug is in the ERASE function in Disk Utility, 10.8.4 and later. If you can use PARTITION directly without ERASE, you will also avoid the Bug.
Using a Disk Utility from any older Mac OS X, including the 10.6 DVD (if your Mac can boot from it) or any saved Installer DVD or thumb drive will 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.
You may or may not run into this problem:
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