disk utility on high sierra fails to format brand new WD 4TB drive?
i bought a 4TB wd elements drive for time machine. it arrived formatted for windows. as i plugged it into my 2013 imac running high sierra, it mounted on my system as the drive 'elements'. the very first thing i did with it was to try and reformat (erase) it as apfs using disk utility. the disk unmounted and then immediately the disk utility operation failed. everything i tried to do within disk utility failed to take hold.
Dropbox - Screenshot 2017-12-30 23.47.33.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bdbz1i2uvtsv99w/Screenshot%202017-12-30%2023.40.28.png ?dl=0
Dropbox - Screenshot 2017-12-30 23.33.01.png
i decided that i must have had received a faulty drive and sent it back to amazon. a replacement drive arrived soon thereafter and i plugged it in, it mounted. and as soon as i tried to reformat the same thing happened.
Dropbox - Screenshot 2018-01-02 21.14.30.png
don't believe i got sent two faulty drives. there must be something wrong with disk utility in high sierra? is APFS not compatible with wd 4tb element external hard drives? drive will not mount any more. i have tried everything in how does one recover from this?
any help much appreciated.
iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), macOS High Sierra (10.13.2), 32 gb, 3 tb fusion drive