How to Format an 18TB HDD (WD Elements External Drive)

Abandon Strings · 8 Dec 2021 at 20:55

Hi!

I recently bought an 18TB WD Elements External HDD. This drive gives you roughly 16.37TB of useable space. I wanted to use this as a backup drive and used Macrium Reflect to clone an 8TB HDD data drive I have in my desktop to it (I've on a previous occasion used EaseUS to make true backups, but ended up with file losses in places, so didn't want to try it this time). After about 19 hours the clone was successful. I was initially left with a roughly 8TB partition but was able to expand this to 15.8TB, this however was not the 16.37TB I previously enjoyed. It seems that Macrium Reflect has a roughly 16TB limit in terms of the partitions it creates, a limit reflected by numerous other applications including 'Acronis True Image for Western Digital' and the inbuilt Windows formatter. This leaves me with over 500GBs of unallocated space, and whilst I know I could create a partition out of this, I'd really rather have one continuous volume as I had before.

Would anyone know how to format HDDs of this size? It seems at present, the software has not caught up to the upper end of actual hardware capacity.

Cyber-Mav · 8 Dec 2021 at 21:09

Just use diskmangement to set it as gpt then make a single partition using all unallocated space then format to ntfs with cluster size of your choice. Not exactly rocket science.
Watch YouTube vids if your stuck

VersionMonkey · 8 Dec 2021 at 21:54

The original NTFS filesystem on your source disk will have been created by Windows with the default cluster size of 4KB, limiting the size to 16TB.

A quick look suggests that Reflect doesn't have an explicit option to change the cluster size during a clone, but there is an option to resize the partition, so that might do it implicitly - you'll see if it allows you to set a size bigger than 16TB in the "Cloned Partion Properties" dialogue.

Some partition software can change the cluster size of an existing volume, but otherwise you are back to reformatting the new drive as @Cyber-Mav suggests and copying the data across manually.

DeliciousStorage · 8 Dec 2021 at 22:06

Abandon Strings said:
Hi!

I recently bought an 18TB WD Elements External HDD. This drive gives you roughly 16.37TB of useable space. I wanted to use this as a backup drive and used Macrium Reflect to clone an 8TB HDD data drive I have in my desktop to it (I've on a previous occasion used EaseUS to make true backups, but ended up with file losses in places, so didn't want to try it this time). After about 19 hours the clone was successful. I was initially left with a roughly 8TB partition but was able to expand this to 15.8TB, this however was not the 16.37TB I previously enjoyed. It seems that Macrium Reflect has a roughly 16TB limit in terms of the partitions it creates, a limit reflected by numerous other applications including 'Acronis True Image for Western Digital' and the inbuilt Windows formatter. This leaves me with over 500GBs of unallocated space, and whilst I know I could create a partition out of this, I'd really rather have one continuous volume as I had before.

Would anyone know how to format HDDs of this size? It seems at present, the software has not caught up to the upper end of actual hardware capacity.

You'll need to reformat the new drive and copy the data from the old drive rather than cloning the partition. If you're worried about file loss/corruption you could use TeraCopy which has a verify option that will calculate the file checksums and warn you if they don't match.

Abandon Strings · 8 Dec 2021 at 22:59

Thanks, seems simple is best. I was trying to extend the volume I'd created using diskmanagement, though was unsuccessful. I hadn't tried just deleting the volume yet though. I'll lay out what I did for anyone encountering the same problem:

Following a youtube tutorial, on diskmanagement I right clicked the disk in question bringing up the menu window and clicked 'properties' and then 'volumes' to check whether it was set to GPT, turns out it already was. I then right clicked the volume and chose 'delete volume' from the menu. I was then left with a fully unallocated drive. I then right clicked the unallocated volume and chose 'simple volume', went with the default values such as NTFS and the default size, assigning a drive letter and title. After initiating the format, it's possible you'll encounter a program such as Acronis thinking a vts.exe file (not sure on the exact name) is ransomware, be sure to allow the file access as it is a legit system32 file. This issue prevented the format on a couple of occasions. After trying it once more, I had further problems, the drive being assigned as 'RAW'. I attempted to reduce the drive size to the quoted size of the disk data, but there really is no need, equally unsuccessful, unnecessary and leaving you with unallocated space. I also tried closing down the program and reopening it, but still got the same. The old 'have you tried turning it off and back on again?' method came in handy though. I restarted windows and tried again, creating a simple volume on all the defaults and this time it worked. I have 16.3TB at my disposal once more. Worth mentioning as these might be some of the bugs encountered when trying this.

darael · 8 Dec 2021 at 23:35

Have you done a full format of the drive to ensure that it is completely defect free? I do this to all my new hard drives to buy me some piece of mind.

Abandon Strings · 9 Dec 2021 at 00:22

Not sure if what I did was enough to be considered a full format. Do you mean doing an extra format before creating a simple volume or some more advanced formatting option?

darael · 9 Dec 2021 at 07:55

Abandon Strings said:
Not sure if what I did was enough to be considered a full format. Do you mean doing an extra format before creating a simple volume or some more advanced formatting option?

When creating the volume, you are asked if you want to do a quick format - normally the box is already ticked and most people leave it that way. On new or unknown drives, I won't.

Paul2016 · 10 Dec 2021 at 22:22

Use Image this disk instead of clone, that way it will a create single file with a compressed copy of all the data on your external drive. After the initial full backup you can then just do incremental ones which will be quicker.

Abandon Strings · 11 Dec 2021 at 10:39

darael said:
Have you done a full format of the drive to ensure that it is completely defect free? I do this to all my new hard drives to buy me some piece of mind.

darael said:
When creating the volume, you are asked if you want to do a quick format - normally the box is already ticked and most people leave it that way. On new or unknown drives, I won't.

I tried the full format and over a day and a quarter later I was left with an error message telling me the format was unsuccessful. The volume was again listed as RAW. Early on in the procedure it was again interrupted by Acronis True Image for Western Digital (I should really uninstall that thing) querying the vds.exe file, which I told the program to trust. I probably should've restarted the full format then, but I was not necessarily expecting it to take over a day to complete. Afraid, I don't think I'll be trying it again as it seems a waste of time and power, thanks for the suggestion, I'm sure it does provide a more secure format and it may have worked without the interruption, but as this'll be primarily a backup drive, I'm not sure how necessary it will be. Anyway, I deleted the volume, created a simple volume using quick format and the format was successfully done in seconds leaving me with a 16.3TB size volume once again.

Abandon Strings · 11 Dec 2021 at 10:45

Paul2016 said:
Use Image this disk instead of clone, that way it will a create single file with a compressed copy of all the data on your external drive. After the initial full backup you can then just do incremental ones which will be quicker.

Would this be the kind of backup method that leaves me with EaseUS type backup files? I tried this method before and when recovering the data on an 8TB archive drive (now used as my primary data drive), I found that some of it had been lost. As a result, I'd rather not go down a similar route and would rather have the exact files/data copied and fully accessible. I will just have to either manually copy any additional data or use FreeFileSync.