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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS NV+ - External Drive Not Recognized
I bought a new Seagate 5TB external drive for backup of my ReadyNAS. I originally attached it and formatted it FAT32 from the NAS, but it didn't recognize the full 5TB. So, I formated it NTFS on my...
What is GPT formatting?
The current drive that works is showing:
File System: NTFS
Size: 2794 GB
Used: 2487 GB
So, it appears that it indeed does support a larger size, right?
Steve
GPT is is a partition type, below the level of the file system. It stands for GUID Partition Table. It was introduced to overcome the 2TiB limitation of the MBR (Master Boot Record) partiton method. The normal limit for MBR partitions is 2TiB (about 2.2TB), and your working drive does seem to have more space than that, for which I have no explanation.
What firmware are you running on the NAS? 4.1.x or 5.3.x?
Running 4.1.16 What does that conclude about my situation?
sjschmidtky1 wrote:
Running 4.1.16 What does that conclude about my situation?
5.3.x firmware would support GPT formatting and drives > 2 TB. 4.1.16 does not, so there is a mystery here on why a 3 TB drive external drive appears to have the correct size.
To answer one of your earlier questions: GPT is a format for a disk partition, that was developed for larger drives some years ago. It is required for drives > 2 TB, and your NAS doesn't support it. There are more technical details on that bit here: https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/
What you can do is connect your 5 TB drive to a PC, and use a tool on the PC to back up data on your NAS over an ethernet connection. FWIW, that will be quite a bit faster than backing it up to a directly connected USB drive. Your NAS has a very slow USB speed.
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