OK, I just jumped the gun and tried an 8TB Red drive in my Mac Pro. The newer WD80EFAX one. It does not only look completely different from the WD60EFAX drive I successfully installed before, it also does not have the screw holes in the standard locations to fit the mounting plates for Mac Pro computers - WTF!? So much about standards, I guess. I removed two of the screws and used a rubber band to get it to -somewhat- fit into the Mac’s HDD slot, and it works as normal, but doesn’t shop up after a warm reboot - just like all of the other modern WD drives (except for the WD Red 6.0TB EFAX one). So the 6.0TB Red are the only way to go for now it seems. Has to be something about the new form factor or something. I still can’t believe that they just decided to change the positions of those screw mounts on a whim, never seen that before. The whole HDD case also looks drastically different, much more bulky. I hope I’ll never see this type of HDD case again, as it’s a nightmare, both mechanically and protocol-wise, not adhering to standards set years ago.
I just went through 2 WD Black 4tb drives with the newest config, and failure on restart is still occurring. Amazon will think i’m trying to scam them…WD4005FBZX 256 mb cache, etc.
2011 mac pro 64gb ram 4 sata drives and os on board mounted SSD,
first time i’ve ever had issues like this with WD and made me sad…
Just chiming in late in case anyone in the future might find these comments helpful.
Regarding screw hole patterns… all drives I’ve seen since about 6TB (and I’ve seen a lot, including 6, 8, 12 and 16TB from HGST, WD and Seagate) have hole patterns which don’t allow mounting with the drive trays in classic Mac Pros. The solution is to buy replacement trays which have the correct hole patterns. OWC sells them and they’re not expensive.
Regarding the disappearing drive problem, THANK YOU so much for the thread. I had put two WD 12TB Gold drives in my 2010 Mac Pro and this exact thing happened. I thought my SATA ports were going bad and I was about to take my computer apart to see if maybe they were unplugging from the main board or something. Thankfully I now know it is the fault of the drives and I’ll just use other ones instead.
Better off to get a NAS and set that up for Apple based clients. This is easier than battling some dinosaur for a machine. The advantage is that the NAS will be available for a new rig.
@Vegan: I do have a NAS setup, for backups and customer data storage. Good luck trying to stream terabytes of audio samples from a NAS (via a custom streaming engine optimized for local drives) – it won’t work seamlessly like that.
Also, at any rate, this computer is not really a “dinosaur”, as Apple has still not really created a suitable replacement for our needs. The new one can’t even hold any HDDs as it only has one slot for a proprietary, encrypted SSD that is rendered unreadable if the machine ever fails as it’s locked to that one, single machine ‘for the sake of our own security’, which is laughable for a machine at that price, and it’s also locked to their later (and for our uses worse) versions of their OS and proprietary file system, so it’s a no go.
Instead we are keeping the working and professional setup we have and are slowly transitioning from 6TB WD Red to SSDs now, as that does not cause compatibility problems, and even increases performance significantly while it also helps reducing noise.
I have a MacBook with 256GB SSD, so I use a NAS for storage as that is the only solution I have. Running a NAS is useful but managing with BYOD is a nuisance.
I bought a 12 TB Gold in December '20 and another one this January, and hung them in my Mac Pro 5,1. The funny thing is only 1 of them mounts after restart the other one is, like described above, not to be found in DiskUtility, nor in DriveDx or any other app.
When I shut the machine down en start it up again, both of them mount…
The one that mounts after restart has model name:
WDC WD121KRYZ-01W0RB1
and Firmware Version:
02.02H02
The one that only comes to life after complete shutdown en start-up from there…
Model Name:
WDC WD121KRYZ-01W0RB0
and Firmware Version:
01.01H01
The drives I ordered were from 2 different batches, likely.
Anyway, if the firmware is the problem, would it be possible to upgrade the ‘older’ one to 02.02H02?
And would that fix the not-mounting problem?
Secondly, I bought two OWC trays to tackle the moved screw holes problem and avoid vibration problems. They fit like a glove.
I got the exally same problem.
Mac Pro 5,1 10.14.6 Mojave
and 3x WD red 8Tb drives.
On reboot they dont get recognized
Must do a cold boot to get them active.
Now Im about to upgrade and are very uncertain What to buy?
There are new sled to fit the new mountholes or you Can 3d print them.
WD80efax, wd80efbx
Any update about working bigger hd?
