New 3TB external disk formatting as 800GB

THANK YOU to everyone who posted here. I had the EXACT same problem and I never would have thought the problem was with my enclosures. I spent hours searching for the answer util I finally Googled "Why only 801.57" and this led to this post.

Again THANKS! All I have to do is buy a new 3TB enclosue.

Wanda

I had this exact same problem with a brand new 3TB WD Green drive when I put it into a OWC Mercury Elite Single Enclosure. I was replacing a 2TB drive, so I didn't expect any problems.

After reading this thread, I suspected it was the enclosure, which I had purchased back in 2008. Fortunately, I had just bought a brand new OWC Mercury Elite Pro Oxford 934 enclosure and quickly swapped the 3TB drive into it. Plugged everything in and right away Disk Utility recognized it was a 3TB drive! Nice!

I'm sure I'll find some use for the older enclosure and its 2TB limit...

Same problem here. I have a Freecom firewire 800 caddy connected for transferring all my work between home and office. I had 1.5Tb drives up to now and they were no problem but this 3Tb drive only shows as 800Gb. If I find a solution I'll pass it on.

FYI - In response to my support question, Freecom very helpfully posted a firmware update to the Quattro drive caddy so that it could see drives over 2Tb. However it's an .exe and they have no idea if there will be a Mac version of the updater! I did try rebooting in Windows but it couldn't see the dock, nor could my friend's PC. Can't really be bothered trouble shooting this further!

I have the same problem in OSX, a 3TB drive being recognized as if physically is an 800GB only drive. It may the enclosure but if I connect the same enclosure to a PC, it does recognizes the full 3TB drive