Disk Utility Won't Initialize 3TB Drives?

[Ccrew]

Originally Posted by macaroniguy

My first Mac was a IIx with a 120 meg Rodime hard drive. I think I know what I'm doing.

That just means you're really really old!

For what it's worth, I've used 3tb with no issues in all my machines except a Netgear NAS device.

[hfg]

Originally Posted by Tesselator

Something is strange there. In single drive I get like 175MB/s average (across the platter) and around 190MB/s sustained for the 1st 65% of the platter, and like 220 to 230MB/s burst.

In RAID0 with those drives I get 400MB/s sustained, 500MB/s burst, and bout 370MB/s "average".

Yeah ... after reading your RAID-0 posts, I have been thinking of getting another 3TB matching drive to RAID-0 them for the speed. I really don't need 6TB of storage, but getting the speed using the larger drives would be nice.

I suppose the measured speed differences could be due to our specific test parameters and test programs used. I was using BlackMagic DiskTest and I believe the default 4GB test file size.

-howard

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by hfg

Yeah ... after reading your RAID-0 posts, I have been thinking of getting another 3TB matching drive to RAID-0 them for the speed. I really don't need 6TB of storage, but getting the speed using the larger drives would be nice.

I suppose the measured speed differences could be due to our specific test parameters and test programs used. I was using BlackMagic DiskTest and I believe the default 4GB test file size.

-howard

Well, also to consider is that you really don't get 6TB of storage with that setup. At least not 6TB of fast stable storage. One needs to keep rotational media at least 40% empty for stability, speed, and migration concerns.

Yeah, IIRC BlackMagic tries to be less synthetic by encoding and decoding the streams. So those rates are encoded stream rates. Still in that bench I get pretty good; Here's two of them in RAID 0 with the read speed on it's way up to the mid/high 380's:

And with the newer version of BM DST they stick in place for better screen-shotting. Here's 4 of those drives in RAID0:

And there's still a difference even with the newer version. Other benchmarkers show rates of around 700MB/s and slightly over with that setup. Personally I like this way best. It's faster at all things (even 4k files @ around 40MB/s average) than a single super fast SSD, the overall cost is still less than a single sizable superfast SSD and of course that's 12TB (or about 7TB managed). The only downside is that it takes up 4 of the 6 internal SATAII connections.

[jackhenri]

Hi,

I to am pulling my hair out trying to format a 3TB seagate drive in my MACPRO 3,1, OSX 10.8.3.

I have tried everything;
Formatting from Recovery mode
Formatting first as NFTS in a windows PC
Formatting with multiple partitions
Formatting with GUID & Apple Partition Map
Formatting through Time machine (read it on a forum- didn't work)
Installing Seagate sleep override

everytime, the progress bar get's half way, then I get the 'File system Formatter Failed - error)

Does anyone have any tips?, I would be forever greatful..

cheers,

jackhenri

[ColdCase]

You may just have a bad drive. My 3 and 4 TB Seagates formatted just fine.

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by jackhenri

Hi,

I to am pulling my hair out trying to format a 3TB seagate drive in my MACPRO 3,1, OSX 10.8.3.

Originally Posted by ColdCase

You may just have a bad drive. My 3 and 4 TB Seagates formatted just fine.

That could very well be.

Jut to note that I've tried every which way to format my 3TB drives under 10.7.5 on my MacPro1,1 and they all just work fine. No troubles at all. Fast format, Erasing empty space, Adding partitions, dumping unpartitioned unformatted drives into a RAID0 array list, removing partitions, and doing all those things plus more on a Windows 7 system first before placing them into the Mac. In all cases the Mac had no trouble recognizing, formatting, partitioning, and RAIDing them. (I bought a whole case of the 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 drives after I saw how the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB drives handled. Very nice drives!)

So I was a little confused when I read the older parts of this thread myself.

<shrug>

[jackhenri]

Thanks Tesselator.. I think maybeI might try and reformat the drive again in a windows PC and erase empty space etc.. I was expecting the drive to work out of the box as previous drives have..
The drive is the same that you mention 3TB SeagGate ST3000DM001 Barracuda 7200.14 SATA III 6GB/s.. I was thinking that the problem might have to do with the 6GB/s, when disk utility does actually recognise the drive(unformatted) it shows as a 3TB 3GB/s

I'm a bit of a luddite I'm afraid, so I'll do my best....

cheers

Originally Posted by Tesselator

That could very well be.

Jut to note that I've tried every which way to format my 3TB drives under 10.7.5 on my MacPro1,1 and they all just work fine. No troubles at all. Fast format, Erasing empty space, Adding partitions, dumping unpartitioned unformatted drives into a RAID0 array list, removing partitions, and doing all those things plus more on a Windows 7 system first before placing them into the Mac. In all cases the Mac had no trouble recognizing, formatting, partitioning, and RAIDing them. (I bought a whole case of the 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 drives after I saw how the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB drives handled. Very nice drives!)

So I was a little confused when I read the older parts of this thread myself.

<shrug>

[Tesselator]

Originally Posted by jackhenri

Thanks Tesselator.. I think maybeI might try and reformat the drive again in a windows PC and erase empty space etc.. I was expecting the drive to work out of the box as previous drives have..
The drive is the same that you mention 3TB SeagGate ST3000DM001 Barracuda 7200.14 SATA III 6GB/s.. I was thinking that the problem might have to do with the 6GB/s, when disk utility does actually recognise the drive(unformatted) it shows as a 3TB 3GB/s

I'm a bit of a luddite I'm afraid, so I'll do my best....

cheers

Just to be clear; I'm saying any and all of those things worked individually. This includes directly out of the box and into the Mac.

[hfg]

I have a couple of those 3TB Seagate drives and they worked fine in my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 ... and in my new 2012 Mac Pro 5,1. They are pretty nice drives, really fast!

Formatting them in Windows may have problems with the 2.2TB limit depending on your Windows machine and version. But no problems with OS X.

Sounds like a defective drive to me.

-howard

[jackhenri]

thanks for your help everyone.. I'm ashamed to say, I ended up just returning the drive...

I don't actually think the drive itself was defective, but I just had no luck with it. I tried everything with my mac pro, then I tried putting the drive in external enclosures etc, attached to my 2011 mac mini..but still no joy..

I think I am going to exchange it for a WD black 2TB.. It's for use as a write drive for Pro Tools in my mac pro 3,1...

thanks again...
jackhenri

[jackhenri]

Well according to the folk at 'ebuyer' where I bought the drive, after rigorous testing, 'the drive was faulty'.

Seems if I had pursued the drive diagnostics tests, i would have saved myself a lot of time, trying to format a faulty drive..



cheers,
jackhenri