I'm having some issues with a new drive that arrived today, a Western Digital 12Tb Red Plus.

My array (3x8Tb Data + 1 8Tb Parity) is running short of space and I decided to upgrade the parity drive with a larger model and re-use the old parity drive as a data drive. I shut down my server, installed the drive and then rebooted. The drive appears in the BIOS but, unusually, the capacity shows as 0Gb. When I boot to Unraid, the new drive doesn't appear in Unassigned devices at all.

I've tried the following:

• Updated to latest BIOS (Asus WS C246 Pro). Same problem.

• I've swapped the 12Tb drive out for an old 6Tb I had lying around. This was instantly picked up by unassigned devices and I was given the option to format it.

• I've installed the drive in my desktop PC. It appears in Windows 11 Disk Manager and I'm prompted to initialise it but when I try that I get "request could not be performed because of an I/O device error".

I'm pretty sure the disk is DOA and I need to return it. Is there anything I'm missing here? It's a larger drive than I've used before but I can't find any reports of compatibility issues with larger SATA drives for my motherboard or Unraid.

Thanks for any help or info.

1 hour ago, SirCadian said:

I'm pretty sure the disk is DOA

Most likely, the diagnostics may help confirm.

Just to follow up on this. The drive was confirmed as DOA and I returned it. Currently pre-cleared a new replacement drive and am in the process of rebuilding parity using the new drive. I'm doing this in maintenance mode so that the old parity drive remains valid in case there are any issues.

Quick supplementary question. Once the parity sync completes, I will want to add the old parity drive back into the array as a data drive. Do I need to format it first, or do I just stop the array, add the old parity drive back in as a data drive and allow Unraid to do its thing (I'm assuming here that it will format the drive and that clear/pre-clear will be un-necessary)?

Thanks!

28 minutes ago, SirCadian said:

Do I need to format it first

You don't, you can format it after it's cleared using the GUI.