re-activate 5TB WD drives on 5,1 Mac?

[Frank Kruse]

Hi,

since these new large 5TB and over drives from WD only mount when you cold-start a 5,1 Mac I was wondering if anyone has found a tool or trick to retroactively mount such a drive after a warm restart?

Doing this via the Disk untility doesn't work so maybe there's a trick without shutting down the mac, walking all the way to the machine room and then restart?

Thanks

Frank.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Hi,

since these new large 5TB and over drives from WD only mount when you cold-start a 5,1 Mac I was wondering if anyone has found a tool or trick to retroactively mount such a drive after a warm restart?

Doing this via the Disk untility doesn't work so maybe there's a trick without shutting down the mac, walking all the way to the machine room and then restart?

Thanks

Frank.

I'm a little confused. What exactly is your procedure? Starting the 5,1 and then some time down the line you start the drives or what? Or are you saying the drives mount just fine from a cold start but on a warm reboot they don't?

Internal or external drives?. Are these WD Blacks or another model? The 4 TB internal WD Blacks I have in my 5,1 mount just fine from either cold or warm boot.

[Frank Kruse]

Like I wrote it's for any drives bigger or equal to 5TB. They only mount inside a 5,1 Mac when you start the machine from being switched off. After a restart they won't show.

It's a known issue. Probably they need too much time to spin up before the boot process times out on them.

I was wondering if someone has found a workaround other than shutting down the machine again after a restart to get the drives back

Frank.

[Sardi]

Have you tried holding the Option key when booting?

You normally do this to choose a different boot drive. I’m wondering if the delay might allow the drive to spin up and mount.

Worth a shot.


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[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Like I wrote it's for any drives bigger or equal to 5TB. They only mount inside a 5,1 Mac when you start the machine from being switched off. After a restart they won't show.

It's a known issue. Probably they need too much time to spin up before the boot process times out on them.

I was wondering if someone has found a workaround other than shutting down the machine again after a restart to get the drives back

Frank.

Which WD model are you talking about? A slow spin-up on a non-system drive shouldn't be an issue; it may take a while to show on the desktop but that's it.

How healthy is the power supply on your 5,1? Getting good airflow through the case?

When I was researching drives for my 5,1 I looked at different makes and was surprised to find some so-called enterprise class drives from Seagate to have a slow spin-up time from rest like up to 20 seconds

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Sardi

Have you tried holding the Option key when booting?

You normally do this to choose a different boot drive. I’m wondering if the delay might allow the drive to spin up and mount.

Worth a shot.


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Might work but shouldn't be needed. Elsewise you'd never see a drive that got started after the Mac was fully booted. We still don't know if these are internal or external drives which brings up a point - does it make a difference where the drives are located in the drive bays? IOW does one bay have priority over another? Maybe swap the drives around?

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Might work but shouldn't be needed. Elsewise you'd never see a drive that got started after the Mac was fully booted. We still don't know if these are internal or external drives which brings up a point - does it make a difference where the drives are located in the drive bays? IOW does one bay have priority over another? Maybe swap the drives around?

Internal drives. Swaping them around doesn't help. It's a known issue. Happens on PCs as well. The WD support site is full of it. Happens will all their drives, reds, blacks blues regardless. All the large drive do it. My 4TB black as well BTW. Heard the same from 3 other users all with cheese grater macs.

On the WD site some people say it's firmware issue with WD but WD never releases FW updates for drives so you have to live with it.

Not a big problem but quite an annoyance when you have to reboot a couple of times and your macs lives in a machine room on a different floor like mine.

Just wondering if there's workaround or a little tool that can do this.

EDIT: What's also weird is that if you had the drive mounted and then need to eject it (for whatever reason), you won't be able to re-mount it with Disk Utility. You'll have to fully shut down the machine and turn on again to get these drives back.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Internal drives. Swaping them around doesn't help. It's a known issue. Happens on PCs as well. The WD support site is full of it. Happens will all their drives, reds, blacks blues regardless. All the large drive do it. My 4TB black as well BTW. Heard the same from 3 other users all with cheese grater macs.

On the WD site some people say it's firmware issue with WD but WD never releases FW updates for drives so you have to live with it.

Not a big problem but quite an annoyance when you have to reboot a couple of times and your macs lives in a machine room on a different floor like mine.

Just wondering if there's workaround or a little tool that can do this.

EDIT: What's also weird is that if you had the drive mounted and then need to eject it (for whatever reason), you won't be able to re-mount it with Disk Utility. You'll have to fully shut down the machine and turn on again to get these drives back.

Absolutely no problem with the pair of 4TB WD Blacks I've been using in my cheesegrater. Cold start, warm boot, whatever - they always show as available on my system. Running OSX 10.10.5 Got my drives 3rd quarter 2017 so maybe they have the new firmware.

And it's NOT odd you can't reactivate a drive with disk utility. It's normal you either have to reboot the computer (either a cold boot or warm boot works) or power down and repowerup the drive to get it recognized by the system.

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Absolutely no problem with the pair of 4TB WD Blacks I've been using in my cheesegrater. Cold start, warm boot, whatever - they always show as available on my system. Running OSX 10.10.5 Got my drives 3rd quarter 2017 so maybe they have the new firmware.

And it's NOT odd you can't reactivate a drive with disk utility. It's normal you either have to reboot the computer (either a cold boot or warm boot works) or power down and repowerup the drive to get it recognized by the system.

Yeah, what I meant was that after a warm-start is not there. As if it wasn't even installed. No hardware in DU detected. Only after a full shutdown it will show up.

I have a 8TB Red that does it and a 6TB in my sever both do it in two different machines running either Sierra or high sierra. My 4TB black does it in my machine and 2 other colleagues in the same building have the same issue also with 4TB blacks all with the exact same behaviour in slightly different generation 5,1 macs.

also see here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7132585

A guy reporting the same thing with Hitachi drives. So doesn't seem to be a WD only thing.

Very odd.

[Sardi]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

What's also weird is that if you had the drive mounted and then need to eject it (for whatever reason), you won't be able to re-mount it with Disk Utility. You'll have to fully shut down the machine and turn on again to get these drives back.

That is weird.

I do that all the time on my media server. For some reason, every now and then, I can’t write to one of my drives in this 4 bay JBOD SATA caddy. I just force eject the drive and then remount it in Disk Utility.

Did you try the reboot holding down the Option key?



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