1TB LaCie d2 Quadra after upgraded HDD inside to 3Tb Hitachi 7K3000 (SATA3 / 7200rpm / 64Mb Cache) could recognized 800Gb ONLY by Mac OS X Lion!?!

Hi I'm only guessing, but as your LaCie enclosure is out of Warranty, that would probably indicate that the firmware is not able to handle the 3TB SATAIII drive format on OS X. I had something similar happen with my Sonnet Tempo Expresscard and updated to the latest eSATAIII Expresscard and now it's OK. EVERYTHING YOU have is new except for the enclosure. Maybe go to OWC online and get an enclosure or a dock certified OK for 3TB and SATAIII ? Good luck.

I think the problem here lies partly with you and partly with LaCie.

Partly you because you were the one who chose to put a 3TB in an older model D2 with no guarantee that model could handle it on a Mac (not I said Mac, not Window). I did some googling on this enclosure's Mac compatibilty and Amazon had a comment about it not being Lion compatible. Apple own store page for this has an unanswered question (near the bottom of the page) about Lion compatibility. So it's not clear this particular enclosure can be used on Lion.

Partly LaCie for having such poor Mac compatibility in the first place. I came across a firmware update for running on macs and they have a page specifically for Lion.

So you want to use that 3TB drive, get another enclosure that documents it supports up to 3TB drives on a Mac. You can be sure you can find one of these at OWC.

Heh, which is what I suggested above. Thanks for the confirmation!

I was typing my reply while you sent yours and didn't see your until I sent my reply.

Synchronicity :-)

And take it up with LaCie, as in ask if there is a firmware update.

one reason to avoid their devices? they needed new irmware for Lion - something that OWC did not need to do with any of their units sold in the last 5-6 yrs.

WD - nice drives and case looks nice but woudl never recommend

There are USB/eSATA enclosures

I think you might want to kiss the La Cie goodbye and get a newer enclosure.

Mail order from OWC is fast and you could upgrade your RAM while you're at it.

From my experience, the new 3TB SATAIII drives work best with the latest generation of docks & enclosures.

(No I don't work for OWC I just have faith in their integrity).

Really? I had no idea it would be difficult from Vietnam. Why is that?

All you need is a credit card and a street address.

Oh that must be difficult! I guess you could do some kind of bank transfer?

Good luck with La Cie. Maybe email OWC and see what other payment options they have?

It has been over a month so maybe this is resolved already? I can't tell how you're connecting the LaCie enclosure to your computer. You said it has USB, Firewire and eSATA connections. Which one is being used? You might try the eSATA connection as that would be the path of least resistance, no USB/Firewire to SATA bridging. And that could be part of the problem.

What's extremly curious though, is that regardless of how you're connecting, that there is an 800GB limit on Mac OS, and no limit on Windows with the exact same connection? That's very curious and makes me wonder if this is a problem with the Mac OS X USB driver (or Firewire) driver? Again, useful to try another connection for this reason.

Another remote possibility is a firmware difference. Mac OS boots using EFI mode. But Windows on Apple hardware uses a CSM-BIOS mode. The thing is, I wouldn't expect the compatibility support module bridge between EFI and BIOS to "fix" a limitation in EFI. So this seems less likely than a driver issue.

It may also be that Apple is strictly adhering to some specification for USB/Firewire, and the enclosure isn't following that strict spec. Whereas Microsoft may "fix" out of spec bridge chipsets in their driver.

Good luck!