WD Discovery software can also be used to manage your drive with WD Drive Utilities™. Password protection with 256-bit AES hardware encryption Help keep your private files private with a password of your choosing with WD Security™ tools to enable the 256-bit AES Hardware Encryption chip on the My Passport Ultra for Mac drive. Included WD Discovery™ software lets you connect to popular social media and cloud storage services like Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox and Google Drive™ so you can import your photos, videos and docs to the My Passport for Mac drive to help preserve your online life. WD Discovery can also manage your drive through WD Drive Utilities.
'is there something am I missing?' Does the WD drive have a 'hidden, proprietary partition', perhaps with some specialized WD software on it?
Software intended for security, disk management, etc.? Sometimes 'pre-packaged' drives come this way out-of-the-box. The presence of such a partition could prevent Disk Utility from properly re-initializing the drive. I personally have bought one USB flashdrive like this (Sandisk drive some years ago). It came with a proprietary partition that could not be removed on the Mac (at that time). I actually had to take it back to where I bought it (Circuit City, remember them?), and have a tech there remove the software using a Windows computer.
After that was done, I then could re-initialize the drive to HFS+. Yes, I did, I also tried formatting using Terminal, to no avail, but as I explained the only way to do it was a 2007 mac mini. Could it be Hardware related? I'm running High Sierra 10.13.1 Beta (17B35a).
Today to have peace of mind I tried an Intel 160GB ssd which I bought very cheap a few weeks ago and I had the same trouble as with the 8tb drive, went to the same friend and yes his old mini formatted the ssd first go, about one minute. I'm going to install an old os x version on the ssd, boot my iMac and see if it can format the drives normally. Yes, I did, I also tried formatting using Terminal, to no avail, but as I explained the only way to do it was a 2007 mac mini. Could it be Hardware related? I'm running High Sierra 10.13.1 Beta (17B35a). Today to have peace of mind I tried an Intel 160GB ssd which I bought very cheap a few weeks ago and I had the same trouble as with the 8tb drive, went to the same friend and yes his old mini formatted the ssd first go, about one minute. I'm going to install an old os x version on the ssd, boot my iMac and see if it can format the drives normally.
I had many problems with Disk utility on High Sierra, formatting is one of them. I found out, that most drives I needed to format I can - eventually.
Step 1 is generally eject the drive. Disk utility in HS seems to fail more than succeed in unmounting the drive on their own. Step 2 - once the drive is ejected, select the greyed out drive in Disk tools and partition or 'erase' as you want. Usually, on third or fourth attempt the formatting succeeds and drive is generally OK. Apple file systems are easier to create than others - few days ago I spent 15 minutes creating exFAT from HFS drive. Kind of nightmare, Sierra Disk utility were quite reliable, why did they have to screw up old functionality is not clear to me. I am also having an absolute nightmare with this all day.
![High High](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125418607/679842650.jpg)
I bought a new WD 4TB external and tried several hours trying to get it to reformat. It fails every time. Now when I try to mount it, I get 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.'
Everything is grayed out in disk utility and I can't do anything. This is the 2nd hard drive I've tried to do this with after returning the first thinking something was wrong with the drive, but now clearly it is High Sierra. There's just no way to format external drives anymore. I don't own a windows computer either.
How could Apple overlook this important issue? I had many problems with Disk utility on High Sierra, formatting is one of them. I found out, that most drives I needed to format I can - eventually. Step 1 is generally eject the drive. Disk utility in HS seems to fail more than succeed in unmounting the drive on their own. Step 2 - once the drive is ejected, select the greyed out drive in Disk tools and partition or 'erase' as you want.
![For For](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125418607/256901560.png)
Usually, on third or fourth attempt the formatting succeeds and drive is generally OK. Apple file systems are easier to create than others - few days ago I spent 15 minutes creating exFAT from HFS drive. Kind of nightmare, Sierra Disk utility were quite reliable, why did they have to screw up old functionality is not clear to me. I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else: The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it.
It’s only three terminal commands First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as. Open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is: diskutil unmountDisk force disk3 You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well. Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number).
I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else: The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it. It’s only three terminal commands First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as.
Open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is: diskutil unmountDisk force disk3 You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well. Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number).
I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else: The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it. It’s only three terminal commands First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as. Open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is: diskutil unmountDisk force disk3 You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well.
Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number). I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal.
I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else: The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it. It’s only three terminal commands First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as.
Open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is: diskutil unmountDisk force disk3 You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well. Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number).
Speculation initially pointed to a reliability issue with converting existing Fusion drives to the APFS format. But the real issue may be a performance hit taken by the hard drive component of the Fusion pair. One of the features of APFS is a new technique to ensure data protection called Copy-on-Write. Copy-on-Write keeps data loss to a minimum by creating a new copy of any file segment that is being modified (write). It then updates the file pointers to the new copies after the write is successfully completed. While this ensures data is protected during the write process, it can also lead to a great deal of file segmentation, scatter parts of a file around a disk.
On a solid-state drive, this is not much of a concern, on a hard drive, it can lead to.