New 4TB WD Red Plus HD failed to initialize.

[jngphoto]

I just purchased 4TB WD Red Plus HD to replace a 4TB WD Blue HD.

I’m using it on a HD dock. My Mac Studio 2 recognise it to be initialised but it failed to erase.

Is my HD DOA?

 

[Ben J.]

Try Disk Utilities. Select the drive, click the "Erase" button, and choose APFS and GUID. Should work.

Edit; I checked again, and it seems that the recommended format for HDD is Mac OS Extended (HFS+).

 

[chabig]

HFS+ or APFS are both ok.

 

[Basic75]

You could use dd in the shell to write a few MBs worth of zeroes to the beginning of the drive. That helps if something got confused by the existing partitioning.

 

[Fishrrman]

Now and then I try to erase a device (usually a USB flashdrive) with disk utility and it "fails".

The failure alert will usually say that it couldn't unmount the target device.

Then, I REPEAT the procedure, and now the drive unmounts and initializes properly.

OP:
Did you stop after "the first failure"?
If you did, try again.

Also... if a repeat or two doesn't change things, try this:
Erase it, but this time choose a Windows format (such as exFAT).

If the drive now seems to go through with the erasure properly, THEN try erasing it again, this time using a Mac format (either HFS+ or APFS).

If THAT doesn't work, try taking the drive to a Windows computer and see if it will erase there. If it does -- again -- bring it back to the Mac and try a Mac format erasure again.

A word about APFS v. HFS+ ...
Using APFS with a platter-based drive that is used for data (only) storage can result in excessive fragmentation and can cause "disk thrashing".

For that reason, only use APFS where you MUST USE APFS -- such as for a time machine backup. Otherwise, use the old-fashioned HFS+.