NewerTech Voyager S3 hard drive bays, where you can put a bare hard drive into the bay, which then works with Macs or PCs through USB 3, Firewire, or eSATA.
Here's an example:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTech/Voyager/Hard_Drive_Dock
I use the S3 USB3.0 dock with my Macs, and they work great. They are fast and reliable.
I bought a WD 3tb desktop hard drive a few months ago, and I've had a really difficult time getting it to work with my Mac. I tried transferring files to it all weekend, and for one reason or another, the transfer process would get interrupted about 4 hours into the process. The drive would not act right -- I could not open it to view files, or it would show that no files had been transferred, or I could not eject the drive.
I had to restart my Mac three times and tried reformatting the drive, and checking its health, using Disk Utility. This took all weekend, a real waste of time.
I kept getting the message "Live file system repair is not supported".
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Forums on the web showed that this many other folks have the same problem. Here are some quotes:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5739421?tstart=0
Force ejecting the drive, shutting down and restarting provides a temporary fix (Disk Utility checks out the drive fine) but the problem comes back on a regular basis now.
I am also now seeing this problem after upgrading to Maveriks (sic). Time Machine stops working with an external USB drive (Seagate) and Disk Utility can't repair the drive with the error "Live file system repair is not supported".
I just thought I would share my solution. I was having the same issues, but I turned off file sharing and it repaired the drive with no issues. Once it was done I turned file sharing back on.
+1 for turning off Sharing.
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I figured that this drive was defective, which was surprising. Western Digital's drives are generally considered to be very reliable.
I ran WD's Mac-based "WD Drive Utilities" app on the hard drive. They never used to have an app like this for the Mac, so I learned something today. It showed that the drive was fine.
I did not believe this, so I took out my Windows 7 laptop (an HP Envy that has caused me a lot of trouble, more on this later) and ran WD's "Lifeguard Diagnostics" utility on the drive. The quick tests showed that the drive was fine, so I ran the 6- hour sector diagnosis. Six hours later, I got the message that all sectors on the drive were fine.
From the forums above, I had seen the note that turning off file sharing in System Preferences had worked. I doubted this and never tried it (because I've had File Sharing on when using dozens of other drives and never had a problem), but I stumbled onto this possible solution:
In Disk Utility, partition the drive as Mac-journaled (this is what I did, other formats may work)
Select the drive and choose Get Info (cmd-I or File--.Get Info).
The Get Info window for the drive will appear. I've never see this before, but under General: there is a checkbox and the words "Shared folder." I unchecked the box, and I am hopeful that this solved this bizarre problem. We shall see; I am two hours into a cloning operation and it is fine so far. We'll see in three hours.
Here's another thing I found:
So, if you have a disk greater than 2TB you cannot have Disk Utility format the boot sector as an MBR type (i.e. MBR would be grayed out). If you must have an MBR formatted disk drive you will need to purchase a 2TB or smaller disk drive.
(MBR formatting is an option when partitioning hard drives; it allows the drive to boot up Windows machines).
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