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Auggie

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 21, 2017
385
108
At first I thought it was a defective drive, but now having received a second one and which is now experiencing the exact same issues, I'm beginning to wonder if this is a much wider problem specific to Western Digital 6TB Black drives plugged into the stock SATA ports of a 5,1 (2012 dually).

The drives fail to mount on restarts intermittently.

Otherwise there doesn't appear to be any corruption of data nor any reported hardware failures via SMART. They just don't show up anywhere, either under System Report, Disk Utility, or other drive/storage utility, when they fail to mount.

I have a WD 6TB Red Pro installed as well but no problems whatsoever.

Has anyone else experienced this issue with 6TB Blacks?

My config is the 3 aforementioned WD 6TBs (2x Blacks, 1x Red Pro), 1 Hitachi 4TB (plugged into second optical drive bay SATA port), 1 WD 2TB Green, 2x 850 EVO 2TBs on a Apricorn Velocity Duo x2 PCI-e card.
[doublepost=1505917308][/doublepost]Well, I think I may have found the problem: it's the drive design of at least 6TB Blacks and Golds themselves, and 6TB HGST drives (also a WD company). It's a confluence of variables involving the drives' TLER settings, which are not changeable for these drives, Mac Pros 4,1 and 5,1, and OS X 10.7 and newer:

WD Gold 6TB problems with Mac Pro 5,1
6TB HGST won't mount after restart in Mac Pro 5,1

The gist is, during a restart these drives don't have enough time to sufficiently "spin-up" to ready-status due to their TLER settings, especially when booting off an SSD (which I'm doing), and therefore are not detected by the hardware. Thus, these are not really "compatible" per se in these scenarios, and there is no solution other than avoiding them outright.
 
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Well if it helps, I've been using 4x WD 6TB Blacks as a RAID 0 in all the internal bays, mainly for 4K ProRes HQ media playback in Adobe Premiere. Been using them heavily for a while without any issues ever.
 
Well if it helps, I've been using 4x WD 6TB Blacks as a RAID 0 in all the internal bays, mainly for 4K ProRes HQ media playback in Adobe Premiere. Been using them heavily for a while without any issues ever.

With the RAID setup, I'm not sure if this somehow masks the issue. Also, if you do not restart often (do full power downs and power ups), then you would not encounter this intermittent problem.

I currently two with a third on the way (ordered but not yet marked as shipped). Not sure what I can do with these two; I do have two NAS boxes but they use 5400 RPM drives. I guess I could sell them for a loss...
 
With the RAID setup, I'm not sure if this somehow masks the issue. Also, if you do not restart often (do full power downs and power ups), then you would not encounter this intermittent problem.

I currently two with a third on the way (ordered but not yet marked as shipped). Not sure what I can do with these two; I do have two NAS boxes but they use 5400 RPM drives. I guess I could sell them for a loss...
Or just RAID 0 the two.
 
Or just RAID 0 the two.

Tempting as that may sound, RAID 0 of three 6TB drives leaves me vulnerable to losing all 18TB of data in the event of any one drive failure. I do have a NAS backup, but takes a much longer time to backup/restore due to the 1GigE interface, not to mention that it currently doesn’t have enough drives to backup a 18TB RAID. Under my existing JBOD-style setup, 6TB is sufficient to hold truly valuable data, while the other two 6TB hold replaceable media and home video files, so I only need to concentrate on backing up just one 6TB.
 
I was able to cancel the third Black so I tried RAIDing the remaining two, cloned a startup volume onto it, but it did not mount on a restart; a cold start was fine, as expected.

So for my rig, with either booting off an SSD (which also is RAID 0 of a pair of SSDs), none of the Blacks will mount due to the known TLER issue. Maybe I'll try rEFInd some day...
 
I'm experiencing this same problem I just got a WD Black 6TB drive from Newegg and it is failing to show up on boot intermittently at first i thought it was because I formatted it with APFS but that's not the case.. will post again after doing some more testing but I'm thinking I'll return the Black and get a Seagate instead...I have a 2TB Seagate and it has worked flawlessly...

Mac Pro 5,1 mid 2010 3.06ghz 12-core

edit. same behavior...a restart yields no mount of the drive, but a cold boot yields the drive... argh time to return to newegg..
 
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What I found on my WD Red 8TB.

1) it always mount properly in Windows (and LINUX)
2) it always mount properly on a cold boot (any OS)
3) it won’t mount after a warm restart to MacOS

I though this is what I get, just accept it. But a week ago, in a “disable TRIM test” (to fix the slow boot issue in High Sierra), the 8TB HDD magically mount properly after a warm restart (with TRIM disabled).

I never think about the trimforce command may affect the HDD mount behaviour, but it does.

If any of you have TRIM enabled, you may try to disable it and see if the HDD can mount properly.

However, if you HDD cannot even mount properly under Windows / Linux, then the chance of “TRIM related” is extremely low.

P.S. WD Red 4TB And 6TB always work flawlessly. But the 8TB is significantly faster.
 
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