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Investigating Problems with Disks
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Topic starter
Hello,
I’ve been using OWC’s Mercury Elite Pro RAID and now Thunderbay enclosures (used in RAID 5 configuration) for a number of years. In the past, I’ve successfully upgraded my hard drives and with the older hard drives, I’ve been able to individually mount it and just use Mac’s Disk Utility to erase/reformat the drive so I can use it as standalone drive again.
For some reason, with my 4 WD 8TB RED drives that were previously used in a Thunderbay 4 with Thunderbolt 2, I’m unable to reformat the drives for standalone use. Before upgrading the hard drives, I’ve been using the latest SoftRAID software (5.7.5).
I even brought the drives to computer repair shop and after working on it for nearly a week, they have told me that they’ve only been able to format the drives in which 1.5TB of the 8TB is available for use.
Is there a correct way to reformat the drives when it was used in a RAID 5 configuration?
Thanks,
JJ
Posted : 19/06/2019 7:56 pm
Yes, because of bugs in Disk Utility, the best way is simply "zero disk", 100 sectors, which wipes the partition map and Disk Utility will be able to erase them.
Posted : 19/06/2019 9:34 pm
Topic starter
Yes, because of bugs in Disk Utility, the best way is simply "zero disk", 100 sectors, which wipes the partition map and Disk Utility will be able to erase them.
To clarify, is "zero disk" & 100 sectors in Disk Utility? Currently using MacOS Mojave 10.14.5.
Or is what you're suggesting is using Terminal via diskutil secureErase
Sorry for the noob follow up here if it is.
Thanks!
JJ
Posted : 23/07/2019 10:30 am
Use SoftRAID to zero a disk. It wipes all partition maps, then Disk Utility can erase it. I do not think Apple will ever fix this bug.
Posted : 24/07/2019 9:35 am
@softraid-support .... I am having this same problem with a set of 3TB Toshiba drives that came with my thunderbay 4... I am wanting to make them small external project drives to pass large jobs onto clients - but they keep showing up as 801.57GB drives -> even after I zero them out.
Softraid sees them as 3TB but disk utility does not.
Any ideas?
Thank you!
Aaron
Posted : 09/05/2021 10:21 pm
Attach a SoftRAID tech support file. What brand enclosure is this?
Posted : 10/05/2021 8:57 am
@softraid-support...
Many thanks for the quick response!
For whatever reason it hadn't dawned on me to just use softraid for the entire process including new volume for the drives. It appears that apple's disk utility is trash and this morning I was able to zero first 100 sectors, initialize, and create a new volume for all three of my 3TB drives I was wanting to do this with. They are working fine in the 3rd party external enclosures.
I was so used to using disk utility for all my non-raid basic disk initialization that I kept opening it up and it kept seeing only 801GB's of space and it frustrated me to no end. (even zeroing the disks completely using the command line disk utility did not fix this.)
Another case of user error!
I should have tried softraid first - it is so easy that I'm embarrassed by the solution - but maybe this thread will help someone else in the future.
Posted : 10/05/2021 11:42 am
