Cenmate 4 Bay RAID Hard Drive will not see my 14tb drive

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Cenmate 4 Bay RAID Hard Drive will not see my 14tb drive

Good day

I bought a Cenmate 4 Bay RAID Hard Drive. It has a 290G HD and that works fine and a 14TB HD that it does not see. Here is the email I got from the manufacturer and not sure what to do:

Hi

After connecting a brand new hard drive to the computer, it must be formatted before the system can recognize and use it;

Operation method: First, right-click on "Computer", then click on "Management", open "Disk Management", find the newly added hard drive, right-click on "Initialization" and select "MBR (hard drive capacity less than or equal to 2TB)" or "GPT (greater than 2TB)", then "New Simple Volume". The next step is to format the partition by default. After formatting is complete, the hard drive can be used normally and the newly added drive letter will be displayed.

Thanks

CENMATE

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.2

Posted on Jan 27, 2025 2:32 PM

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Answer 1

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HWTech

Community+ 2026

Level 9

70,310 points

Jan 28, 2025 1:44 PM in response to Brian Litecky

Those are instructions for Windows users. That does not bode well for macOS support. Not all devices are compatible with Apple or macOS. Plus I've never heard of that brand which makes me extremely skeptical of that RAID enclosure.

The macOS instructions can be found in this Apple article which explains how to erase the whole physical drive (14TB in this case) by using Disk Utility:

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support

If you don't see the physical 14TB hard drive when using those Apple instructions, then there is a hardware issue of some sort....perhaps just a compatibility issue (HD & enclosure, or enclosure & macOS), or a bad device (HD, or enclosure, or cable).

Another important question is whether that RAID enclosure even supports a 14TB drive.

And how do you have that RAID enclosure configured? If you are using such different size hard drives, then I'm assuming it is setup as JBOD where each drive is being accessed individually.

A 290GB hard drive is also a very odd size and implies it is very old. It is possible it could have issues or is causing a compatibility issue with the newer 14TB hard drive.

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