I just installed new drives in my MacPro and cannot find the RAID option in Disk Utility

Try to politely ask for the problem to be escalated to a "Specialist". The "First Responders" are unlikley to have special training on these sorts of issues.

After selecting the raw "SEAxxxx" drive name and erase there are not going to be any physical or logical volumes or partitions.

Some people post screen shots taken of what Disk Utility is showing.

And I would not exclude using the demo and even buying it for mirroring instead of Apple's implementation for RAID and has more features and more robust. It has recovered drives that Apple RAID has failed to work with.

http://www.softraid.com

They also have over 15 yrs of doing just software RAID for Mac platform.

So the apple guy was great and we ran through a bunch of options. In the end he was stumped and is going to have the engineers look at the issue. He had me send him a log of some captured data and is going to get back to me. He wants me to check with the disc manufacturer (seagate) to see if this is a know issue.

Basically we know that the drives I did a secure 1 pass erase on got formatted into a scheme or partition that mountain lion does not like. The drives mount, appear fine, verify fine and will write data but the mac OS will not allow them to be partitioned, raided or re-erased. The drives were fine before the secure erase. For some reason the secure erase caused a weird format, logical partition, that the mac os does not like.

These are seagate 4tb ST4000DM000 drives. Anyone know of issues with these drives if you do a secure erase?

At the moment apple doesn't know why this happened or how to fix it.

Thanks!

Nice timely article "Tackle stubborn disk partitioning" right up your alley with some terminal commands

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57596602-263/tackle-stubborn-disk-partition ing-in-os-x/

I just got off the phone with apple. I was on the phone with them yesterday for a while and eventually sent them a log for the engineers to look over. Here is their explanation of what is going on. This is a know issue that just presented itself with the 10.8.4 update. In that update they addressed an issue with bootcamp not working with larger drives. They fixed that issue but unexpectedly created this issue with large hard drives mounted internally and disk utility. It's a disk utility issue. On macs running 10.8.4 disk utility will not correctly format any new INTERNAL drive over 2 tbs. Drives that were formatted before updating to 10.8.4 are fine but any new drive over 2tb connected internally to a mac running 10.8.4 will produce this same issue I am having. They know about this and are working on a patch. There is a 4 step terminal solution but we found a simpler solution. If you connect the new larger drives externally you can format them with no issues. This problem only presents itself to internally mounted drives. We formatted my drives via usb dock and were then able to mount them via the mac pro internal bays and everything seems to be normal again.

Sounds like reason to buy http://www.softraid.com

Apple's testing is.... too narrow and has frequently missed when dealing with RAID and Mac Pro storage customers.

Count me in. I have just installed 4 new 4TB Hitachi Sata3 7200RPM drives. I'm on 10.8.5. On the start it asked me to initialize all 4 drives. I did an Erase option (HFS+ journaled). Drives initialized, but there are NO labeles on them in the left column, they are all displayed as Untitled. I wanted to creat software RAID 0 with all 4 drives. RAID option is unavailable for all 4. Any advice would be highly appreciated.

Thanks

Hey Shelant1977,

Check my post above. My solution was to intialize drive externally and then mount them internally.

Hope this helps.

I did try this. After a couple of hours of fiddling around with different external enclosures, I was able to successfully initialize drives in my Mediasonic eSata enclosure and RAID 0 all 4 of them. After installing them back into the Mac Pro, the RAID volume was recognized properly. Whew, that was a pain in the neck... Hopefully, OS X 10.9 will fix this...

Thank you. I had the same problem with the Seagate 4TB. By connecting them to the external enclosure, I was able to initialized and get the RAID to appear in the Disk Utilities.

Same issues as decribed previously in attempting to RAID 0 two Seagate 3TB Barracuda drives (which had previously been formatted remotely via an eSATA connection). The eventual work-around, under guidance of AppleCare, was to remove the drives from the MacPro where they did not appear on the SATA bus, reformat through a USB external connected to a MacBook Pro (where they they curiously renamed as 850GB ST300 ... ), and then reinstalled them in the MacPro where they finally appeared with their proper names 3TB ST300 ... and all the proper erase, format, RAID, etc buttons in Disk Utility. From there I was able to RAID them without any further issues.

Note that the drives were originally formatted remotely via an eSATA connection through the normal dialogue interface ( ... this drive is unreadable ... initialize ...) on the MacPro, under 10.8.4 and seemed to function normally. I never examined them through Disk Utility, so it is likely that the drives were not properly connected to the SATA bus all along.

Note that remotely connecting them via eSATA showed the drives exactly as when they were in the computer.

Note that the reformatting was possible via USB on a different machine. It would likely have been possible via USB on the MacPro also.

Finally, the helpful AppleCare support person, believes this might be an "internal SATA bus" connection issue being caused by a software issue with Disk Utility. He is going to punt this to Enginneering.

I have the same issue w/ 3TB Barracudas. I've had two of them in RAID 0 for months; I had one drive fail before the 10.8.4 update, and the replacement arrived after the update, and now I can't re-RAID them. Thanks for the info about SoftRaid and the info from the Apple engineers. I'm wondering a) if there is a link to the terminal commands to solve the problem (because I'm not going to buy SoftRaid right now) or b) if there's any hint as to when the patch will come out fixing it (I can guess the answer to that one, but it's worth a try.

Thanks for your investigating. I was going crazy wondering if I'd forgotten how to create a RAID. Haha.

Question: I have the same problem. Tried to set up RAID "0" in Maverick 10.9. Disk Utility doesn't show tabs for Erase or Raid for my two Seatgate 3tb discs. It's now December 27th. What's the bottom line/ easiest way to solve this. I need the RAID asap for my final cut editing. By the way. I was doing okay with my muticam until I upgraded to Mavericks. Then it slowed down to a crawl forcing me to buy another 3tb drive and attempt a RAID. Also, one of my 1tb internal drive is now not recognized.... maybe cause of Mavericks. Thanks for suggestions.

The easiest solution is to put drives in an external enclosure, format them. Then if you want you can mount them internally. After you have formatted the drives in an external enclosure you will be able to mount them internally and the raid option tab should appear again in disk utility.

Note sure if 10.9 has corrected this yet or not.

Hope this helps,