Have been running a 2TB 2011 drive as a TimeMachine and it’s great. About 2/3 full and I’ve decided to put it on a shelf and get a new 3TB drive. I pulled the 2TB out of a RocketFish (RF-AHD35) enclosure and put the 3TB in to set it up. It immediately told me drive wasn’t readable and prompted me to Initialize it which I did. GetInfo tells me it has 801.23 GB capacity. DriveDX says it is 3TB and everything is great. DiskUtil shows it 801.57 GB capacity.
Partition Map is GUID
Format MacOS Extended (Journaled)
Assuming initialization nuked files on drive so went to WD site and downloaded
Install_WD_Discovery_for Mac
WDDriveUtilities_MACOS
Drive Utilities asks me to attach a supported WD Drive but drive is not recognized
Discovery begins to install, at 41% says extracting and aborts to earlier screen.
I hadn’t considered that, Darn, I liked the enclosure enough that I just bought a new one on eBay. My previous 2TB drive had no problems. I don’t know “32 bit LBA” so I will need to do some reading. RocketFish I believe was bought by BestBuy or NewEgg so I would guess no continuing support.
This is often due to formatting issues between the drive, enclosure, and macOS. First, I’d recommend opening Disk Utility on your Mac and selecting the drive (not just the partition itself). From there, try reinitializing it by choosing Erase with the GUID Partition Map and MacOS Extended (Journaled) format. This will wipe everything on the drive, so make sure it’s okay to lose any existing data.
You could also try creating a new partition to see if that allows for the full 3TB, or try erasing it with the APFS format to check if that helps. Also, check if there are any firmware updates available for your RocketFish enclosure since an update can sometimes fix size limitations with larger drives.
If possible, connecting the drive directly to another computer through a SATA port (instead of the enclosure) can help verify if the drive is recognized as 3TB on its own. Lastly, running First Aid in Disk Utility can help repair any partition issues.
Make sure to back up your data before erasing it so you can recover everything later. You can create a disk image or clone the drive for this purpose if you think your data is precious.