Seagate Expansion Desktop drive 3TB

In case it's of interest to anyone, I worked around this problem myself by partitioning my 3TB hard drive into two separate NTFS partitions - one 2TB and the other 1TB.
I will use the 2TB partition to backup my ReadyNAS (which has 2TB RAID drives installed).
The ReadyNAS hapilly sees the two partitions, so it's obviously a problem with drives bigger than 2TB

With there being such an easy fix, it's a pity that Netgear could not have advised on this in this forum, or even publish some guidance on disk drive sizes supported - especially as drives bigger than 2TB are now very common and quite cheap - instead of leaving users like me struggling, wasting time, and scratching our heads - I'll bet this is a common problem.

I have found Netgear's product support really bad generally, and I will not be buying any future Netgear products for this reason.

Hope this info is useful. BTW I partitioned the disk using the standard Disk Management features in Windows (on My Computer, right click and select "Manage" to get to this facility)

Its definitely of interest to me... I was quite happy (all things considered) to find a recent thread indicating that I was not alone in my troubles.

Very similar situation... I'd picked up a 3TB Seagate desktop backup drive a few months back only to find that my original intended use (attached to the USB 3.0 port on my Netgear router/firewall/access point) didn't work - not recognized. I'd already 'upgraded' that device to DD-WRT, and it sounded like it was more a function of DD-WRT not handling >2TB filesystems than anything. So later when I got my ReadyNAS Duo V2, I had hoped to plug into it to perform backups. Again, as you encountered... no go.

I know you said you formatted it with two partitions - a 2TB and a 1TB, and plan to backup to the 2TB partition... what (if anything) are you going to use the 1TB partition for?

It seems like this may be a problem with the underlying Linux kernel being old enough that it doesn't natively support >2TB... if so, I'd say it needs to be updated!

I resolved this problem with change MBR/NTFS partition type to GPT/NTFS.
Seagate Expansion manufactured with MBR/NTFS type.
But ReadyNAS cannot recognize MBR partition type with > 2TB.
Windows Disk Manager can easily change MBR disk partition type to GPT.

ref:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26193-convert-mbr-disk-gpt-disk.html