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I acquired an 8TB 2.5" External HDD USB 3.0. It is a 'noname' brand, so I want to make that clear up front. In any event it comes with four 2TB individual drives showing up in gparted (sdb, sdc, sdd and sde, respectively on my computer). When I received it these 4 drives were formatted in 'exfat' format.
I want it to be formatted to a full 8TB as an EXT4 filesystem for use with my Linux systems. I have attempted to reformat the entire unit as one drive using 'gparted' and it refuses to be altered. I deleted the formatting and have formatted them in EXT4. I have used 'gpt' instead of an MBR BIOS setup. I have changed them all to 'gpt' and EXT4 formatting but that still does not allow me to combine them into one single HDD of 8TB size. Is it possible that it has 4 independent controllers in it? What can I do (if anything) further to reformat this drive in the manner I have set out?

sawdust
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user3386373
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  • The device names of sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde are for physical/logical drives rather than partitions (of a drive). So there would not be *"4 independent controllers in it"* (on just one connector), but rather a single controller presenting four logical drives to the host. Don't you end up partitioning each (logical) drive so that there are also device nodes for /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1, and /dev/sde1? – sawdust May 30 '21 at 00:40
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    Does this answer your question? [Is there a size limit on external USB hard drives?](https://superuser.com/questions/308492/is-there-a-size-limit-on-external-usb-hard-drives) Seems like your external drive is constrained to use only 32-bit LBAs. – sawdust May 30 '21 at 00:54
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    @CharlesKenyon there's no reason you can't do that. The maximum limit of FAT32 is 2^28 blocks which means [8TB if using 32KB clusters](https://superuser.com/a/1584016/241386). And it's GB, not Gb which is only 1/8 GB – phuclv May 30 '21 at 01:44
  • **New HDDs don’t come with partitions** – Ramhound May 30 '21 at 03:04
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    Use whatever that allows you to use multiple drives like one drive. LVM, btrfs or even mdadm RAID (0). (I don't think RAIDing will do you any good though.) – Tom Yan May 30 '21 at 03:46
  • CharlesKenyon. I received this particular Hard Drive with what appears to be 4 separate devices under the one unit. In my Fedora they show up as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd. (I have an M2 stick as my main drive which shows up as /dev/nvme0n1 so it starts at /dev/sda. The unit had ExFat formatting and dos/MBR BIOS settings when I received it. – user3386373 May 30 '21 at 05:29
  • New HDDs don’t come with partitions. Ramhound. This unit showed up with 4 identical sized partitions in ExFat format and all four showed up as separate drives when I ran 'fdisk -l'. In 'gparted' they were separately selectable and showed as having a format under each one. They were identical in size etc except the first one was Primary and the rest were not. – user3386373 May 30 '21 at 05:39
  • sawdust: I am very confused as well why they show up as /dev/sda, etc but they definitely do. Right out of the box they were that way. On your second point 'Does this answer your question? Is there a size limit on external USB hard drives?' I am not sure. Being it is a noname brand maybe there is something to the 32 bit constraint. I am running a 64 bit system both hardware and OS. I have exceeded the 2 TB limit on several 4TB drives before including USB connected ones. I have no personal knowledge of the Controllers (inside the External USB Case) and know of no way to find out. – user3386373 May 30 '21 at 05:54
  • Tom Yan: I tend to stay away from LVM and RAID so not an option for me. Thanks ... – user3386373 May 30 '21 at 05:56
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    Then there's no option for you. (Well maybe apart from disassembling it and putting the internal drive into another enclosure.) – Tom Yan May 30 '21 at 07:17
  • @ Tom Yan, I would have posted your comments as an answer and not as a comment. Feel free to copy the content of my posting and add your proposals - I don't want to steal the credits you deserve. – r2d3 May 30 '21 at 11:43

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First of all, with formating you only treat the content of a partition. Formating, or "reformating" as you call it, does not solve your problem. Gparted - as far as I know it - does not help you at all, because it partitions within one drive.

You need to establish an additional administrative layer that combines your four drives into a big one.

This layer can either be provided by the firmware of your external box or by your linux software. If you can configure your box such that it presents the four drives as a big one, you can continue using GParted.

Both comments given from Tom contain the two possible solutions for your case.

r2d3
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  • I agree with most of the answers and comments that have been posted. I have never encountered anything like this in my many years of installing and/or attaching 'spinning iron'. I just thought someone may have encountered such an aberration and put me onto just what I am looking at. I will possibly pursue the extraction from the case and putting the drive in another piece of hardware and see how it responds. Thank you all for your comments/answer and I will consider this topic closed. I will try to figure out how to set any flags to show this item as closed. – user3386373 May 30 '21 at 17:14