OSX Mountain Lion only sees 2TB on 4TB drives in Drivestation Duo HD-WL8TU3R1

[gregy1]

Hi - First post. Have searched for a similar thread but not found, but if this is answered already, please let me know.

I have a Drivestation Duo HD-WL8TU3R1 with two Hitachi 4TB drives inside. It's brand new, and was advertised as supporting Mac. It's connected via USB 3 to a MacMini (latest version) running Mountain Lion. So far I've been unable to get Disk Utility to see the drives as the 4TB they are. One showed as 1.8TB, the other 2TB. I removed them and connected them directly via SATA in another Mac and formatted each of them for GPT, 4TB (nominal), HFS+, then re-inserted them into the Drivestation. Same result - one is 1.8TB, the other 2.2TB. Sounds to me like the firmware in the Drivestation is not properly communicating with the Mac. Ideas?

[msodrew]

I have this same exact problem and after 3 hours of troubleshooting I have not found an answer.

I ordered a DriveStation Duo 8TB (2 x 4TB) and received it from Amazon.

No matter how I try to setup the DS Duo, Mac OS X (10.9.1) sees the drives with erroneously lower maximum capacity. One drive has 1.8TB and the other has 2TB instead of 4TB and 4TB.

When I arrange it in RAID 1, the combined drive has 1.8TB (as expected for the erroneous capacity report) and in RAID 0 it has 3.8 TB of space (again, as expected).

I removed the drives from the DS Duo thinking that maybe they shipped with lower capacity drives. Nope. Appropriately inside were two Seagate 4TB drives. It appears that the drive firmware is simply buggy and not reporting drive capacity correctly.

I troubleshooted a lot, trying many things before giving up:
- Erasing the drives
- Formatted the drive in RAID 0 and RAID 1 with Disk Utility AND then the Buffalo RAID Utility Tool for mac
- Reformatting to HFS+, and then FAT32
- Used the drive on a Windows machine and used the supplied Buffalo RAID utility to do the above all over again, same results.


I am a software engineer and professional with computer equipment, so I'm confident that I've tried everything possible from my end.

This person, posting from back in May 2013, seems to have the *same exact issue* and received no help: http://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php?topic=11940.0

Is my unit defective? I checked your official downloads and there is no updated mac utility. Please help! Thanks.

I will return this to Amazon if I cannot resolve this.

My Hardware Overview:

  Model Name:   MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:     MacBookPro10,1
  Processor Name:       Intel Core i7
  Processor Speed:      2.7 GHz
  Number of Processors: 1
  Total Number of Cores:        4
  L2 Cache (per Core):  256 KB
  L3 Cache:     8 MB
  Memory:       16 GB