Formatted 2TB WD Green drive showing 820MB used on empty disk

wdgreen2TB.pngHi, I have a newly formatted 2TB WD Green drive. It is completely empty however it is saying that there is 820.6MB used on the disk. The drive is completely empty, when I look at the invisible files on the drive there is only a .DS_Store file taking 10KB.

Where is the mystery amount going? I was thinking that maybe there were some bad blocks that have been written out but so far a TechTool 7 surface scan is nearly 80% of the way done, but no bad blocks to be found.

When I told the OS not to Spotlight search the drive, it still says that there is 819.8MB on disk.

What am I missing here?

The drive is sitting in a fairly new external USB enclosure purchased from Other World Computing that I’ve had a 3TB drive in. The reason for the Green drive versus a Black one is that it is to be connected as an additional drive to my Time Capsule because energy and temperatures are something that I want to reduce. This was purchased before the Red drives started to become more affordable.

Anyway, I do know that when a larger drive is used in an enclosure or Mac that can’t handle that size, the drive doesn’t report the true Capacity of the drive but rather one limited to one that the hardware can handle. This is not the case, as you can see in the attached screenshot. 

Also I’m running on a MacBook Pro supporting Yosemite, so I don’t think age is an issue.

(In the screenshot right, I am wondering why the highlighted amount is on my newly formatted and empty drive.)

Is there an issue with this drive? Should I be contacting WD for replacement? It was manufactured April 16, 2014, so still under warranty.

Cheers, Andrew.

I think it is my external case as it says in the docs that it only supports “up-to” drives of 2TB and maybe this drive is just slightly larger than what the case thinks is 2TB.

I will confirm with a different case tonight.

Welcome to the Community.

As an alternative, you could attempt formatting the hard drive once again using GUID Partition Table as opposed to Apple Partition Map or Master Boot Record.