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Mac Pro and 3TB drives

[I posted this in the wrong section first, although it did apply there since I tried it on a 2008 Mac Pro]

I tried a 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drive in the July 2010 Mac Pro (and a Jan 2008 Mac Pro) on the RAID Card that came with the machines (so one is the RAID Card now shipping) and both show a maximum of 2.2 TB with a 3TB drive.

I'm curious if anyone else has tried this with different results. Any luck in getting the RAID Card to see the full 3TB in the drives?

By the way, without the RAID Card, the Mac (OS 10.6.4) sees the full 3TB, but not with it.

Anyone else seeing this?

2010 Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Sep 14, 2010 12:40 PM

56 replies

Munas

Level 4

1,270 points

Feb 6, 2011 3:28 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thank you Grant Bennet-Alder,

I will see it soon, when iI have my 3TB disk delivered. I was just hoping that someone has a quick and simple answer.
Thank you 🙂

Ziatron

Level 5

4,186 points

Feb 6, 2011 10:34 PM in response to Christian Riley

This 3TB Drive works fine in my Mac Pro.

I got just the drive, no case.

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-3-5-Inch-Internal-DrivesWD30EZRSDTL/dp/B00 471UDWI/ref=sr13?ie=UTF8&qid=1297060359&sr=8-3

Munas

Level 4

1,270 points

Feb 8, 2011 2:19 PM in response to Ziatron

Hi Ziatron.
It is good to know.

sinoue

Level 2

236 points

Feb 9, 2011 1:32 PM in response to Christian Riley

Just bought a new Mac Pro stock 2 quad core running 10.6.6.

I pulled the 1 TB drive with the Mac OS and filled all 4 drive bays with Hitachi Deskstar 3TB drives and ran the Mac OS X install disc and applications disc. Apple's Drive Utility had NO PROBLEM formatting the drives HFS+ Journaled and create a bootable Mac. The Apple SW Raid was even able to stripe Mirror 0 the other 2 drives.

The problem I ran into was when I tried to use the 4th drive exclusively for Windows 7 64 bit Pro via Bootcamp. The install went fine, but when I looked at the drive I saw that the drive was only using 2.2 TB.

I believe the Hitachi 3TB drives come pre-formatted for 2.2TB NTFS to avoid all the HUGE issues on the WIndows platform around being able to use these drives (ie you can't use them for boot, and you need to format GPT and you need Vista 64 or Win 7 64 bit, not the 32 bit versions.

So i used Apple's Disk Utility and Paragon's NTFS for MAC to format the 3 TB drive NTFS GUID. Big mistake. I haven't been able to install Windows 7 despite spending 2 days on it.

When I used the Mac Disk Utility software to format the full 3TB drive as one partition the WIndows 7 installer says that "Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style." It didn't seem to matter if I tried to run with Bootcamp's help, or solo (ie pulled the Mac drive out and treated this as a PC only rig). Windows 7 installer's format and delete options also resulted in this same error. My guess is that the WIndows disk supports EFI boot and format, but that the installer won't put Win 7 Pro 64 bit on a GPT or GUID disk, that it has to be a Master Boot Record or MBR disk with a maximum of 2.2 TB (32 bit size).

I've tried partitioning the drive into a smaller 2.2TB size to see if that would help. My guess is that the Apple formater isn't the same kind of format that Hitatchi originally had on the drive.

Running the windows 7 Pro installer just got me into an endless loop with the drive. Holding the mouse button after the beep on the restart was the only way to get the WIndows 7 install disc out of my mac. Otherwise I got the "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD".... message that goes in an endless loop.

Once I had the disc out all I got under Win 7 hard drive boot was a black screen with blinking cursor loop.

If I hold down the option key I could get the options for my 3TB Mac drive, my 3TB windows drive, the GRMCPRXFREO_EN Windows 7 Pro installer disc icon and a EFI Boot disc icon. Choosing EFI Boot just freezes on the startup disk screen. Rerunning the Windows 7 disc installer just puts you back into the press any key to boot loop.

At this point I'm giving up on using a 3 TB Hitachi, 3tb Seagate or a 3 TB Western Digital drive as a boot drive for Windows 7 and I'll put in a 2 TB disk drive that stays in the 32 bit world of Master Boot Records until Microsoft can work out a real 64 bit boot environment.

Interestingly Apple OS X 10.6.6 did include support for exFAT which does support 3 TB, but this disk format has no error correction settings, and is much more prone to read/write errors if improperly shut down. SInce there are almost no diagnostic exFAT I think folks are much better off with NTFS or FAT32 (which doesn't have much error support, but at least their are recovery and backup utilities).

If anyone else gets a dedicated 3TB WIndows 7 boot drive on their Mac Pro please let me know. I'd be interested in knowing how you solved it! Maybe Paragon's GPT Loader will help?

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Feb 9, 2011 2:07 PM in response to sinoue

Some editorial rambling and rant, or jump to the end for some ideas.

PC motherboards have BIOS support for 3TB or you split it up which you could easily have done and use the first 100GB (more than enough) for the OS, and use the rest for whatever you want.

you don't need to bother with Boot Camp Assistant or want to (unless using the OS X drive or using XP).

Good review of 3TB drives came out Monday.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/3tb-hdd.html

Did you insure the drive was NOT GPT (Apple GUID)?

A good idea is to strip a drive of all partitioning with WD Lifeguard (from within Windows).

For OS, an SSD 80GB is fine. Use mechanical drive for data etc.

GPT booting in Windows is being added for X68 boards to support UEFI and Sandy Bridge, but Apple uses a proprietary version of UEFI and don't expect to see EFI firmware updates.

Other threads have taught me that the Apple Pro RAID card's firmware doesn't support 3TB drives, and has trouble there, so I think they have a lot of work on their hands with 3TB already.

UEFI does have "some" support, very limited, with 64-bit Vista SP1 and later, but not on Macs, I think Itanium and Windows Server 2008.

I wish Apple Disk Utility and Boot Camp Assistant would be rolled into one utility, much easier, but DU isn't useful - At least Paragon NTFS seems to be better and closer to Microsoft NTFS 3.1 standard, but always best to let Windows do the formatting.

And Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 2011 Suite has a lot of features and tools rolled in, and Boot Camp support.

stripe Mirror 0

RAID0 = stripe
RAID1 = mirror

http://www.acnc.com/040101.html

I've never seen drives pre-formatted except when bought from OWC. And that was wrong also and wasn't GUID.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/GPT-on-x64.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/gpt-64bit.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/gpt_faq.mspx

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html

IF (big if) our Intel based system supported Intel RAID at the motherboard....

This document provides a step by step guide to install an operating system into GPT Disk on Intel® Hardware RAID, under uEFI environment.

http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/CS-031158.htm

http://www.uefi.org/home/

Ps: Paragon 3TB boot loader is for XP.
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/paragon-gpt-loader-lets-3tb-drives-work-under -windows-xp-2010113/

*WD Advanced Format Hard Drive with a Windows*

If your operating system is either Windows 7 or Vista, WD recommends using the latest Intel driver version 9.6 or later for maximum performance in all situations. Please visit Intel for the latest driver downloads.

http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7

*Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST)*
+Are 4k sector disks supported?+

If you try to install the operating system on a 4k sector disk with a driver older than Intel® Rapid Storage Technology version 9.6, the installation process may not complete successfully.

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031502.htm
March 2010

You probably want to load Intel driver during install phase when you have the option. Which is 10.1 as of Dec 2010

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support/highlights/chpsts/imsm

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Feb 12, 2011 11:05 AM in response to Munas

It is called thread hijack for a reason.

The thread was about Apple RAID card. Then yours about software, then someone with their using 3TB for Windows.

See what happens?

Me too! threads that go off in multiple directions.

I have NEVER seen Yes/No, more like playing 20 questions with "yes, but" as it splinters. Heck, I did you a favor, you just want yours to be lost inside a two page thread.

Feb 16, 2011 7:48 PM in response to Christian Riley

Anyone have a definite answer? Does a 3TB drive work or is there a way to make it work in an external enclosure?

I have a Hitachi 3TB in a Macally enclosure and it does not seem to work.

Munas

Level 4

1,270 points

Feb 16, 2011 10:11 PM in response to drwebmail

As regards to an external enclosure it depends on model and manufacturer of it. I sent a letter to Rocstor regarding Arcticroc 4T and 3GB disks and received a positive answer (it was no statement about max disk capacity supported for this device). However, some other manufacturers clearly states that a device supports up to X GB disks http://www.newertech.com/products/externalhd.php
or you can read it from a context like here http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MEQX2T12.0S/

If you device's technical spec does not contain max disk capacity, you'd better contact manufacturer and check it before buying a disk.

Feb 20, 2011 2:35 PM in response to Christian Riley

Christian Riley wrote:
I tried a 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drive in the July 2010 Mac Pro (and a Jan 2008 Mac Pro) on the RAID Card that came with the machines (so one is the RAID Card now shipping) and both show a maximum of 2.2 TB with a 3TB drive.

Sounds like the RAID controller needs a firmware update. Whether one exists or not is another story 😝

The Western Digital 3TB drives have a computability jumper - I don't think the Seagate's do 😟 It would be interesting to see if the WD with the jumper set works with the built in RAID controller. It's good to know that the 3TB drives work without the Apple hardware RAID controller.

From all the threads in these forums, the Apple hardware RAID controller really sounds like a bad deal - not very flexible at all, even if it is convenient to allow an internal hardware RAID array.

equitek

Level 1

4 points

Apr 18, 2011 7:14 AM in response to Christian Riley

So... Just to recap: it appears the answer to Christian's question is currently "NO" <-- You can't use larger than 2.2TB drives and have them recognized for their full storage capacity at the moment with an Apple RAID Card in a Mac Pro/Xserve. The drives will work fine, but at reduced 2.2TB capacity.

No word yet if the "compatibility switch" on WD drives makes any difference, and only the 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drives have been tested with an Apple RAID Card for certain (by Christian). The drives were formatted GPT, and work fine at full capacity in the Mac Pro without the Apple RAID Card.

Possibilities for a fix are a firmware upgrade for the Apple RAID Card to address a possible 4K/512b issue, but that's just an educated guess by all the fine minds in this thread.

Thanks to the Hatter and and Grant for trying to keep the thread on topic. I recapped only because others might be in the situation I am and need this answer quickly, if this topic got anymore general with the other scenarios addressed as well I never would have made it through the thread.

I will be purchasing 4 - 3TB Drives for a Mac Pro with Apple RAID Card shortly... If I only get the 2.2TB per drive to use it will still meet my needs, but if anyone wants to suggest a drive model to try please feel free. Currently I'm leaning toward the Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000. I just can't see any reason for SAS over SATA in this case, and I don't even see any 3TB SAS drives available, but if someone knows something I don't please fill me in!

Thanks everyone! 😀

May 23, 2011 5:05 PM in response to sinoue

I don't think WIndoes itself is the issue with 3tb drives, if I understand things correctly it's the BIOS.

I have what my windows PC "Sees" as a 16 TB drive (A Drobo) and it all works fine.

IIRC for Windows XP Bootcamp had to emulate a traditional BIOS, but I think Windows 7 can handle EFI (BIOS Replacement used in all Intel-based macs) natively.

My MacBook Pro DOES see an external 3TB drive I use as my time machine archive as a full 3 TB (1st gen Unibody, about a 2009ish model)

Kaprolat

Level 1

0 points

Jul 14, 2011 2:04 AM in response to Timotheus D

Hi!

Just got my 3 TB WD Caviar Green SATA 6Gb/s, (SATA 3,0) RPM-IntelliPower, 64 MB. I formatted the 3 TB WD in Disk Utility as GUID partitioning in 1 partitioning as Mac OSX Extended Journaled as I shall use it as the system disk in my Mac Pro modell 1.1.

But before- and after partitioning the 3 TB WD disk showed up ONLY as an 8001,57 GB WD in disk utility.

How can I format this 3 TB WD HD to be an 3 TB HD and use it in my Mac Pro as a systemdisk?

Jul 14, 2011 11:51 AM in response to Kaprolat

"Green" drives are great for backups, but not appropriate for System Disks. They tend to spin down and power down, and the system tend to visit the Boot drive very frequently to get a few more blocks of one thing or another.

Are you using 10.4.6 or later ??

Kaprolat

Level 1

0 points

Jul 14, 2011 12:34 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Hi!

I´m using OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, but how can I format this 3 TB WD HD in disk utility and installed it as a 3 TB HD in my Mac Pro model 1.1?

Jul 14, 2011 12:55 PM in response to Kaprolat

3TB drives, even those that are "green" or those that use 4K blocks DO format correctly under Mac OS X 10.4.6 and later.

"A drive that does not reasonably accurately report both its make&model and its size/capacity has died."

If that drive was sold as 3TB and is reporting 8000 MB when placed INSIDE the Mac Pro (not in an enclosure), it is not functional, and should be returned to the seller. Attempts to format it are a waste of time. It is dead.

Mac Pro and 3TB drives