JBOD Hard Drives- 16TB only seen as 2TB

I have an external SansDigital box with four SATA drives in it (2x16TB and 2x3TB). I striped them all in MacOS Ventura 13.6.3 as a JBOD for time machine use. This is an older eSata based RAID box connecting to my 2017 iMac 5K via a ioGear TB3 to eSata adapter. It does not support port multiplexing. The big JBOD time machine would not stay mounted longer than 15 minutes. Kept disconnecting probably due to the adapter. When I tried to delete the time machine it would not let me. When I used disk utility to delete the raid I got red exclamation points on all drives and it would not let me erase each either.

I moved to a PC with an external SATA to USB adapter. I used the command line and cleaned each drive. However, now that I'm back on my mac all four drives, the two 3TB's and the two 16TB's will only show as 2TB.

Is there a way in the terminal to format these drives to get them back to their designed sizes? Or some other app that can see the true sizes and allow for partitioning to bring them back? The partitioning function in the disk utility fails to see the true sizes as it did prior to me creating a JBOD. Thanks

iMac (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Jan 11, 2024 6:17 AM

Reply

Similar questions

1 reply

Jan 11, 2024 7:40 PM in response to tedtv

Hard to tell what is going on without being able to inspect. However that 2 TB limit sometimes results from ExFat file format or from using Windows to format a drive in a way that is constrained to 2 TB:


https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/backup-and-storage/support-for-hard-disks-exceeding-2-tb


I still think if you erase the drives at the device level (use show all devices) in Disk Utility you should be able to format the drive with full capacity in whatever volumes you want to configure. But you may have to go back to the Windows machine in this case to fix this, see the link above for that.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

JBOD Hard Drives- 16TB only seen as 2TB

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.