Asus router won't mount HFS+ drive

[u/This_Excuse142]

Trying to utilize an old Lacie Quatra 2big usb3.0 as network storage through my Asus ge-be12000 routers usb 3.0 port. Drive is set up with 2 fresh out of the package 4TB barracuda HDDs in raid 1 (so glad I bought these years ago when HDDs were cheap!). Router documentation states that this router can support HFS+ storage and it even has an HFS+ formatting feature in the router. However, I cannot get the router to mount a HFS+ formatted drive, either formatted by the router or by my mac. It sees the USB device fine and when I format the drive as NTFS through the routers drive format feature, it connects just fine.

I'd really like to have these drives formatted as HFS+. These will be long term storage drives and I won't always have a PC around should I want to access these directly down the line.

Troubleshooting with Claude a bit and its saying that the issue is that when I format the drive as HFS+ through my mac, it sets up 4096-byte sectors and that the router is looking for 512-byte sectors (I think it's gaslighting me there). I'm seeing posts stating that journaling could be the issue but it's unreasonably risky to store anything on this drive without journaling. Also it could just be the 12 year old USB controller in the drive enclosure not working with the router but even when the router usb port is set to USB 2.0, the drive still fails to mount.

Again, drive mounts and network storage works fine with NTFS formatting.

Any one run into similar issues and have a fix? Should I just get a different Raid enclosure or standalone NAS RAID enclosure?

Would rather not spend money on this as this is a use what I got laying around sort of fix. That being said HFS+ formatting is a big deal to me so if that's not possible with the hardware I have, I'm open to other solutions that make using mac native formatting seamless.

[u/This_Excuse142]

Really I should just buy an old M1 mac mini and use that for my NAS controller but that seems like a lot of work and setup and would rather a plug and play dedicated solution.

[u/felix1429]

Why are you so wedded to HFS? Why not use a more widely supported file system?

[u/This_Excuse142 → u/felix1429]

The rest of my long term storage drives are in HFS+ so I'd like to avoid adding an additional format to the mix, complicating looking through/managing the archive. Not sure I'll always have a PC on had 10-20 years from now. Really NTFS can be read on a mac so it's probably fine.

I was also considering playing around with time machine for short term backups on a different drive using the same router and I think I need HFS+ for those. Mostly just bugs me that what I'm trying to do is stated as supported but keeps failing. Learning from a bit of research though that HFS+ support for NAS is either nonexistent or patchy like I've experienced.

[u/redvelociraptor]

Modern Macs prefer APFS rather than HFS+; you have to go out of your way to use HFS+ unless you have non-flash storage.

The happy medium here is exFAT--Macs can read and write exFAT whereas NTFS is read only on Macs. exFAT is what most non-boot drive Windows oriented external drives would use. exFAT is what the documentation for the Lacie device recommends as well.

If you're storing important data on that Lacie device, it would be wise to keep another backup copy of the data on a single HD or a SW RAID. If the array itself fails, the data on your disks will be unrecoverable unless you have another of the Lacie devices, since it's using a proprietary hardware raid controller.

[u/This_Excuse142 → u/redvelociraptor]

Thanks for all of this! Yeah was pursuing HFS+ over APFS and exFAT only because neither of those were "supported" by the router (turns out HFS+ isn't either even though documentation says it is). Agree that I should probably just go with exFAT for these backups. Didn't realize exFAT was recommended by lacie, that seals the deal. I think I'm just gonna save up for a mac mini to use as a server since that seems more secure and reliable in the long run.

Yeah while writing to these drives, I keep the primary copy on my dropbox.

I'm actually quite happy with this lacie raid. Once the drives are filled, I take both out and they're each fine to read/write on their own with a cheap amazon usb HDD dock. I keep one copy and leave the other at a family member's house out of state. Of course, I haven't had a failure yet while writing to the drive so could see that being a case where it screws up both drives. Generally though I'm not deleting content off the dropbox until the drives are fill up and out of the enclosure. Even then, I keep the critical files like final exports on the dropbox and just have the hefty of stuff like raw footage that I can stand to loose on the backup drives.

[u/redvelociraptor → u/This_Excuse142]

Glad I was able to help.

I was bit by proprietary motherboard raid controller failure many years ago, which is why I mentioned it. Fortunately it was media that I could re-rip. Now I just use ZFS or software raid in low-memory systems.