WD 3TB Red Hard Drive can't format.

As The hatter reported below in his post of 27 Aug, there is a BUG in 10.8.4 that precludes formatting drives larger than 2.2TB In Internal bays. It does not appear to be fixed in 10.8.5.

As others have observed, older External enclosures may not support drives larger than 2.2TB, and there may be nothing that can be done for that, they are simply too old.

Well after posting, I tried to shut down but had to do a hard shut down. After booting, the drive did appear in Disk Utility with a CoreStorage partition.

I tried to erase the drive (partition was grayed out).

It worked!

I now have this again:

/dev/disk6

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *3.0 TB disk6

1: EFI 209.7 MB disk6s1

2: Apple_HFS Untitled 3.0 TB disk6s2

Are you saying that 3TB drives will format fine with some newer eSATA cards/enclosures? If so, that's what I have. Fine.

I'm going to try it again with TM, but if it fails again (and that could be due to other things I know), I'll have to go through this again. I don't want to send Toshiba a drive that I can't zero out if it's been my TM drive with all of my personal data.

I don't know what initially caused the drive to act up in the first place. It was only after many attempts that I got it to reformat the last time.

Two years later and this seems to be the only thing I can find that discusses an issue I am currently having.

Having just run out of photo storage space on my Mac Pro (2008) I replaced a pair of striped 1TB WD Black drives with a single 4TB Red. Understanding this is an NAS drive it is being used exclusively in a data storage rather than operating system environment, and the Mac Pro 2008 is listed as being able to support 4TB storage in each of its four drive bays.

Installation as always was a breeze. After booting up I was presented with an error window that read "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer" with options to Eject, Ignore or Initialize. I chose the latter as it's common to have to pre-format a new drive. Mac Disk Utility correctly recognized the drive and capacity and formatted it (Mac OS Extended Journaled), the drive immediately mounted with its new name, and I dragged some test files in and out with no issues.

I proceeded to copy almost 2TB of photos from the original drive volume without incident. Once the transfer was complete I was able to access files directly from the drive, and they were immediately recognized by Adobe Lightroom. I worked on some files between Lightroom and Photoshop, saving along the way. And I imported files from another catalogue into Lightroom which again went smoothly.

Booting up today I received the same error window despite the drive working flawlessly yesterday. Only this time it is showing as having 0 Bytes capacity. The Mac Disk Utility > Erase format options are grayed out and inaccessible as are the Partition options. RAID options are still available including ability to format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) along with the RAID set options. Except the RAID Set estimated size is showing Zero KB. When I drag the WD Red drive into the RAID window the Set size remains at Zero KB. When clicking on the Red drive in the drives pane the Mount and Eject options are both grayed out. I have rebooted a couple of times and have physically removed and reinstalled the drive.

I am running Mac OS X 10.10.4. Where I am most confused is trouble free operation following initial formatting, to the drive not being recognized nor any capacity recorded.

To the best of my knowledge, the bug created in the ERASE function in Disk Utility in 10.8.4, that precludes the correct formatting of Internal drives over 2.2TB in an Internal drive slot has never been fixed.

I fully expected the rest of Mac OS X to "catch up" and allow the Use of Logical Volume Group formatting for regular drives, but it does not appear to have happened.

There are some recipes for using Terminal commands to delete the excess Logical Volume Group partitions and use the drive, but they are a little complex. If you can re-boot your Mac to anything older than 10.8.4, including to 10.6 Installer/Utilities DVD, that is much easier.