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?
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sawdust
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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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