I goofed up two 4 TB drives trying to mirror them. Help.

depending on your hardware some wont recognize HDD bigger then 2TB, i know my x3/gen3 has drivers just for 3TB+ hard drives.

Thank you for the reply, but the drives were originally recognized as 4 TB drives. The size was reported as over 3,700 GB (I did not write down the exact number - I was expecting to see it again)

Thanks
Jon

Try using GPT partitions.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

MBR partition limit is just on 2TB

Oops, double post!

Hi Thanks for the suggestion.

The drives were originally GPT partitions, after converting to Dynamic Drives this was limited to 2 TB. So I changed the drives back to basic drives and converted them to MBR and then back to GPT to see if that would reset the size limit the Dynamic drive step introduced. It did not help.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Jon

what brand are the drives?

Hitachi 5400rpm "Coolspin" $319 each  

Thanks for the suggestion. The program recognizes the drive capacity:

"Full device capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes"

The "perform quick wipe" option is quick. The disk management initialization still only sees the drive as a 1678 GB drive (my 2 TB drive has a capacity of 1862.89 GB - Odd)

I may try the 50 MB/second format or pay for the faster format time.

Thanks
Jon

You may need to investigate that your motherboard properly supports these drives.

There is another option:
There's a free version of a program called "Syncbackse" that I use. You can set it to scan Drive #1 every day then apply any changes to Drive #2.

The mirroring method has BOTH drives spinning at the same time and the Syncbackse method only spins up the second drive long enough to back things up (and shuts down after a certain time such as 30 Minutes of non-use as set in your Power Options.)

Syncbackse sounds like a good option.

The motherboard is a Dell one from this time last year. I will check if it supports the drives. It recognized them and showed the correct size originally, so it should support them. (It will not support them as a boot drive, but I only want to use them as data drives).

Thanks for the suggestion.

Jon

Thanks again
I found the problem after checking out Dell:

The 512e Advanced Format Hard Drive support was not installed.

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/globa...

2. Determine if the Hard Disk Drive is Advanced Format or Not

Use Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) driver console to verify whether the drive is Advanced Format or not. The Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver must be revision 9.6.0.1014 or later and all the latest updates for the Windows Operating System must be installed from Windows Updates.
Click Start, Programs, Intel, then Intel Rapid Storage Technology.
Click the Manage icon.
Click Advanced and then click the desired drive.
If the physical sector size is 4096 bytes, it is a 4K hard drive.
If the physical sector size is 512 bytes, it is a regular hard drive.
If both the physical sector size and logical sector size are 4096 bytes, the drive is a native 4K drive.

I installed a sata update, and an Intel update, then did a low level quick wipe of both drives.
Then I could: create 4 TB basic drives, convert to 4 TB dynamic drives, and mirror them.

Weird that the drives were initially ok and the conversion to dynamic caused the problems. The intel rapid storage always indicated the drives true size but it still needed updating.


Thank you to everyone who took the time to help.
Jon

Best answer selected by JonSAlberta.

This topic has been closed by Maziar