Maximum capacity HDD in Mid 2010 Mac Pro?

Sorry if I post in the wrong place but I have a related problem. I have a Mac Pro 5,1, Mid-2010 and I have purchased a number of 6 TB drives. They work just fine on their own but I cannot RAID them using the Disk Utility, that option dissapears when I go over the 6 TB disks. Is there a limitation to the software RAID utility in MAC OS X? I run 10.9.5 (Mavericks).

Can it be done from the command line?

P.O.

P.O.fromberlin

As mentioned earlier in this thread, the default from ERASE-ing a drive over 2.2TB with 10.8.4 or later in an Internal slot is to give it a Logical Volume group and a Logical Volume.

Once set up this way, disks can be encrypted easily or turned into a Fusion drive, and nothing else. Solutions are in the older entries above.

Hello Grant and thanks for your reply. All in all I have 4 6 TB disks. The two first I initialised as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and they worked fine in OSX on their own. The other two I left uninitialised. These last drives I could easily convert to a Striped RAID (12 TB) but adding the already initialised disk fail, they are not possible to add to the RAID. I have no idea how to "unititialise" the drives, I will try in another machine. Any hints are welcome. I did not find a solution to the problem I now have in the thread above.

P.O.

My exact post above:

Re: Re: Maximum capacity HDD in Mid 2010 Mac Pro?

in Terminal use:

diskutil cs list

If you see Logical Volume Group partitions, the drives are ready to be used for a Fusion Drive, but are NOT ready for anything else.

I have no idea how to "unititialise" the drives

The drives should be Erased, [but NOT as Internal drives under 10.8.4 or later] -OR- their Logical Volume Group information should be deleted as described in that exact post referenced.

Thanks again, this solved my problem, I could erase all logical volume group information, this is what I meant with "uninitialise" 😉

I now have a RAID with 64 TB with r/w at over 550 MB/S 🙂

Excellent news!

The bad news is that in El Capitan 10.11, support for Disk Utility RAID has been taken out of Disk Utility. Now you are forced to use Terminal:

$ diskutil RAID

but otherwise, it continues to work.

Striped RAID is great for fast temporary storage, but if the RAID breaks, you are likely to lose everything. Backups are very important !!

Hi again and thanks for the warning but I am not going to put anything on this volume that I cannot loose or recreate. For serious business you need backup for sure. In fact this was only a test to see if the hardware could handle it, I will use it under Linux, the older (2010) Mac Pro is a great solid piece of hardware.

Many thanks again for your candid support.

P.O.