Question: I just got a new 4TB WD RED NAS HDD and when I plugged it in, the drive can be seen in BIOS. However, whenever I try to format the drive in disk management, it says its “Not Initiated”. And it’s giving me an error message “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. Is the drive broken?

Answer:

whenever I try to format the drive in disk management, it says its “Not Initiated”.

You have to initialize the drive first.
Initialize to GPT partition scheme, create a partition and format it.
(GPT partitioning is necessary for drives larger than 2TB)

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