4 TB Hard drive formatting default to Logical Volume Group

Now you know why Seagate has a technical support website and telephone number. But if I had to guess my guess is that your model does not support 4 TB drives (when your computer was designed there were no 4 TB drives; in fact, there were no 6 Gb/s drives which is why the SATA interface only supports 3.0 Gb/s.)

I don't know for sure because I don't know as much about your model as I know about the 2008 and earlier models. What the bus can handle depends upon the SATA controller chip, and based on what little I know of yours I don't believe it is able to handle that large a drive. If you put the drive in a suitable external enclosure it would probably work as expected. But finding an external enclosure that handles up to 4 TB drives isn't that easy.

It's probable that you could simply partition the drive into two 2 TB volumes, but I'm not quite sure what Disk Utility is doing with your drive.

Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:

{ diskutil list; echo; diskutil cs list; } | open -f -a TextEdit

Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).

Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the icon grid.

Paste into the Terminal window (command-V).

A TextEdit window will open with the output of the command. If the command produced no output, the window will be empty. Post the contents of the TextEdit window (not the Terminal window), if any — the text, please, not a screenshot. The title of the window doesn't matter, and you don't need to post that.

If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.

I don't know why the drive is formatted that way. If you have backups of the data, or if there's no data on the drive, you can try to convert the CS volume to HFS without risk.

Run the following command in the Terminal to destroy the logical volume group (copy and paste it):

diskutil cs delete 2011994C-9C0A-4E4D-B293-C25FE75ED89F

After doing this, does the drive appear as a corestorage volume or as a standard drive? If it's standard, then try selecting the drive device in Disk Utility and use the Partition tab that appears to create "1 Partition" (in the drop-down menu) and ensure the partition scheme is GUID (by clicking the Options button). When this is done, the system should have formatted the drive as a standard device and not a CoreStorage volume, but report back here if it does.

Message was edited by: Topher Kessler

This is likely accurate information. The drive's controller may have a hardware limit such as 32-bit LBA and 512-byte block size maximums, that prevent it from addressing over 2.2TB volume sizes. I guess Disk Utility's method for working around this is to use CoreStorage, but its bizarre to me that it would recognize it as a 4TB device in hardware (as shown in your cs drive list tree) if this is the case.

There is a term for this: "Take it with a grain of salt"

They have come out with total nonesense before on various issues.

Maybe if the fessed up that there are bugs in the hardware architecture and in the kernel and every system almost can get slapped around (not supporting 128GB RAM, only 96 but then an OS X update didn't support more than 64GB). I wonder if they really do thorough testing. Which was one of the reasons all the worries about Apple abandoning the Mac Pro market.

Graphic cards too. Or RAM configurations. And when new drives or higher density DIMMs come out, do you think they update the web page specs or anything? No.

Apple Pro RAID card is stuck in the past and has a 2.2TB limit. Not SATA chip controller.

The 2009 model shipped with a 10.5 or 10.6 DVD. If you still have that, boot to it, answer only the "What Language" question and wait a quarter minute while it draws a MenuBar. Then choose Disk Utility off a Menu.

Ask 10.6 Disk Utility to partition the 4GB drive into one partition (NOT "as currently partitioned"). Let us know the results. [10.6 does not know about logical Volume Groups, so it does not have those bugs.]

Do you swear you do not have an Apple RAID card installed?

I spent the entire day figuring this out on my MacPro4,1 (2009), so while I still don't know whether it's better to format each drive as HFS+ or LVG, I can answer your original question!

"can't figure out why when I initialized the 4 TB drive it defaulted to a Logical Volume Group"

Yes, since Lion this is the default filing system, and yes, you can format your drives as Journaled HFS+, no matter the size.

I freaked when I learned about the fusion drive as I had just extracted my DVD drive and installed 2 Samsung 120GB Solid State drives in the Upper & Lower bays. I was primarily worried about Core Storage being in charge of my roughly 10TB's worth of animation & graphics resources and feared I'd sooner or later encounter some failures when CS tried to copy video sources during editing... transferring 50GB of files to the SSD for a single project scared the s out of me, so I wasted a day figuring out a procedure.

Monday: two 120GB SSD (Upper & Lower Bays) | three 3TB Seagate Drives (SATA in Bays 1-3) | one Seagate 4TB (SATA in Bay 4) | all of which were formatted as LVG's

Thursday: all drives formatted as Journaled HFS+

Method:

1) backup a drive

2) shutdown

3) extract drive from bay

4) restart

5) connect drive externally (should come up as unreadable and ask to initialize)

6) click Initialize or just open Disk Utility

7) in the DU window, select the drive (not the volume underneath)

8) click on the Partition tab

9) select 1 Partition from the pulldown menu

10) click the Options button

11) click the GUID radio button, then OK

*You couldn't reformat the drives because the partition scheme of all LVS-formatted drives are Master Boot Record, not GUID. Furthermore, when the drive in connected in the bay, the LVS prevents you from re-partitioning the drive)

12) select Mac OS Extended Journaled for the format, name it and click Apply

13) after formatting is complete, quit programs and shutdown

14) install drive back into bay

15) restart (the disc, even though formatted as HFS+, will come up unreadable so open DU)

16) for some reason, the bay interface doesn't like the externally formatted drive, BUT since the LVG has been deleted, you can now move forward

17) select the disk (not volume), click the Partition tab, select 1 Partition, click Options and select GUID and OK, select Mac OS Extended Journaled, apply and voila!

Follow-up Q's: So now that we can create HFS+ drives and eliminate LVG's, it begs the question, does having multiple LVG drives open the door for the OS to fuse them at some point automatically? Since my SSD drives are HFS+, I assume this is not a worry. But now, I'm wondering that if I have 4 drives individually formatted as LVG's, will each drive remain discrete? If so, then is the LVG format way better than HFS+? If so, why? Or did Apple just start using LVG's in anticipation of fusing SSD & HD tech? All I wanted to do was prevent the OS from spreading my data across multiple physical drives, so if LVG is tons better and each drive will always remain completely separate, I'll switch back... hopefully someone will answer before I've copied all the data to the fresh HFS+ drives:)

Not being able to initialize 4TB Seagate drives in 10.8.4 was acknowledged as a Bug -- that was supposedly introduced when fixing something for Windows, and it broke something in Mac OS X as well.

I think it is entirely possible this bug goes a bit farther back than 10.8.4. The guy who had this acknowledged as a bug had pressed his case with AppleCare, and they were able to get Engineering to respond and duplicate it and figure out what was up. He was told to expect a patch/software update fix sometime soon, maybe it would make the next update cycle.