WD My Book Duo RAID1 WARNING!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 เม.ย. 2017
- I ran into some serious issues with my WD My Book Duo RAID hard drive. It was working perfectly fine but then one day it was unmounted from the desktop and I couldn't see it with Disk Utility. The drive had disappeared from my operating system with no way to access the files. Was it a failed enclosure? Was there some weird WD encryption to blame? Here's what I discovered.
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THANK YOU! Spent hours with WD chat and DELL support going in circles trying to get my WD MyBook Duo set up. WD chat was USELESS! Watching your video showed me that I needed to download the WD Drive Utilities. The product came with NO INSTRUCTIONS and the online manual was useless. I now have it configured after almost 8 hours of being jerked around. Thank you!
Thank you for sharing! I'm glad I found this before I configured my new drive.
I'm about to buy one. Does it come preformatted for Mac in the HFS-J format or EXFAT?
I was curious, do you think you could have got your footage back if you hooked it up to a windows computer sense it was cross capable ?
...but did you try hooking up the drive enclosure to a PC via the Ethernet port? just to see if you could recover (copy/transfer) your files? instead of Mac?
In the 9-10m range, you were discussing the encryption concern, and said you could read the drives in another enclosure. That's good to know, since the claim was you couldn't. But you didn't say whether you could read the data on a separate dock. That would make me feel a whole lot better with these things, feeling that there's no way an enclosure failure could kill my data, and if I had to use a dock, I could.
Also it's a couple years since this video, so is there anything different with the new versions? I'm seriously considering a 12tb raid 1 for archival (and using occasional backups of critical data) but I want to know if it's worth doing this, or just suffering through trying to keep duplicate copies of my data on multiple drives.
Question: is there possible to install non WD disks into My book duo, Thanks....
What about if during a storm a power overload burn all the MyBookPro?
All datas disappear maybe. I mean. Isn't better to have two indipendent
boxes in two different places... maybe one unplugged from the power
line? Is it possible to use it with only a HDD inside and put the second
HDD only sometimes when we want to do the backup? WD say that if you
remove the second HDD and insert it again, each time you have to set
again the RAID mode and the backup is not incremental but it starts from
the begin each time. I really wonder about this. Is there any
difference if I remove it and insert it again when power is off? I just
want to keep on distance the second HDD and insert it only when I want
to do the incremental backup.
Did you try connecting the drive to a windows PC? I've had similar issues and used Ubuntu and the drives mount just fine. Note (I don't think Ubuntu supports exfat) I gave up too soon after multiple attempts with my MacBook. WD hfs+ NTFS and EXfat drives have done this to me.
Also after more research I've found that if you wait 30 minutes are more with it connected to our macs. The EXfat drive eventually mounts as a read only drive. This happens after it fails multiple times to mount as a read and write drive in the background. I think mine HFS+ was due to unplugging before ejecting the drives. Not by me but sometimes I would notice when coming back to my MacBook I'd see the improper ejection warning message. Note I don't recommend using non powered USB hubs.
As for the NTFS drive failing. I'm in the same boat for a reason why. Maybe software?? Let me explain.
I know Ubuntu worked like a charm. So, I just recently tried uninstalling all WD software. I still couldn't get the NTFS drive to mount, except with Ubuntu. I did a fresh Mac OS install then I connected the drive and the NTFS drive mounted immediately on my mack OS sierra.
Since My recent experience, I will not be using WD software again.
This footage is very informative regarding hardware encryption!!
I'm so glad I came across this video! Sorry for the loss of your files. I would be devastated if I lost my personal projects :(
how did you was able to reformat the drives if your pc couldn't see them? thx
I have the same question too, how can you reformat a disk that does not show on your mac
Well I am having this exact issue. Now after watching 15 min video I still have no idea how to recover my files on the WD Duo? Thanks.
I have a newer duo and one has failed. I bought a replacement drive, but am not sure how to start the rebuild on my Mac running Catalina. Any suggestions?
WD should have documentation to walk you through the process. Hopefully you didn't lose anything!
I am familiar with this problem. Amazingly I came up with a super easy solution. I connected the hard drives to a Windows PC which immediately recognized that one of the drives had an error and offered me to scan and fix it. After clicking on "Fix it" button the drive was scanned and corrected and started working again. I connected it back to my MacBook Pro it was working. This happened at least 3 times and now watching your video I am realizing that exFat is probable cause. Thank you, I will reformat them too
Did you try to use a recovery software after reformatting your drive from EXFAT to HFS+J ?
Excellent video! Saved for future reference!
When you were trying to recover the data, did you try to access the raid on a Windows PC?
How about the My Book Duo Cloud, would you recommend that?
Thank you for a very useful, well considered and informative posting. Confirmed my suspicions about exfat.
I have a 12TB mybook duo which was formatted exfat but it went awol so I reformatted it as HFS+j about a week after I got it.
I must agree about their software - reports "errors" and then dumps you, stranded, with nowhere to go.- Tear the thing apart and re-fomrat, with data lost.
The issue isn't exFAT itself. The issue is that Apple does a poor job implementing industry standards, as it wants its customers confined to its walled garden as much as possible. But as the video shows, if you are going to use Apple products, you should probably stick with Apple's internal standards like HFS+, despite its shortcomings, such as the lack of checksums. Linux can read & write HFS & HSF+ volumes, and commercial products like MacDrive for Windows allows Windows systems to also read, write & repair HFS & HSF+ volumes.
Did you check Finde> Preferences if the option Share>Connected Servers and Devices>External Disks were both ticked on? If these were not ticked on, it could prevent you from seen the drive on the desktop. Another thing you could have done, was to renew your DHCP under System Preferences>Network>Advanced>TCP/IP and clicked the button Renew DHCP Lease.
I had the same issue on my pc. Suddenly the MyBook was gone ( NTFS Format). I plugged out the disk to see if there is still something on it. No luck. After plugin´m in agian, i changed cables, power adapter and usb port. And then it runs again. No problems.
I learned so much from this video. You are excellent at explaining your process and how you went about it.
Good info., but you probably could've told us all that in 3-5 mins
He was building suspense broski
damn annoying when they just lengthen this shit
Should have read comments first. I got caught too. Plus it’s for Mac users not PC.
He should apologize
I don't know. I appreciate the troubleshooting and his personal experiences.
Stronz, now I'm concerned. I use one of these for my video archive. But I can't recall how I formatted mine. Do you happen to know if there is a way to look and see?...Before it's too late.
Yes, in Mac OSX Disk Utility you can check and see the formatting of the drive. Not sure how to do it on PC but I imagine there is a similar function.
Did just that. Mine lists as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), which I suspect is the option you recommend. Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention, Stronz. (Now, I'm grateful I was following your GH5 thoughts so closely, otherwise I might have missed this helpful advice.)
Backup your data! Just cause you’re running in a RAID configuration doesn’t mean you don’t need backups. You still have a single point of failure which would be the enclosure
Sorry to break this to you but it's not an exfat issue. These duo enclosures have hardware accelerated encryption. Which is a nice thing. However, if you routinely do a lot of large file transfers, the chip on the board in the enclosure that's responsible for encrypting as it writes to the disks and decrypting as it reads from the disks, will overheat and wearout because there is no heatsink whatsoever on the chipset. As the chip starts to fail, your enclosure or individual disks in the enclosure will dismount sporadically. Furthermore, if the chip overheats during a file transfer, the file might finish transferring but the data will be unreadable. On top of that, due to the fact that each chip has a unique encryption algorithm, if the chip or enclosure fails, you cannot simply remove the discs and read them even in another duo enclosure. All the data will be lost, albeit the disks can be reallocated in a partition manager but again all data is lost.
To make matters worse, even if your data is intact but encrypted and thereby still unreadable, WD will not let you know what the decryption key is that will allow you to recover the data via software decryption. Why would WD not provide that? I can only assume they are sacrificing their current customer's satisfaction for security and also because WD made deals with certain data recovery firms to provide them access to the decryption keys for profit in a croney kinda way.
The good news is, for people who do not do a lot of large file transfers(I'm taking GBs at a time), these enclosures and their encryption chips will last years and years. The easiest way to overheat the encryption chip and eventually kill it is to transfer data to or from the enclosure in TB amounts non stop. That will kill the chip in less than a year.
Good point but are you sure about that? He says that after "recovering" the WD My Book Duo (by reformatting it using HFS+J) he tried to take out the drives from the enclosure and test them on a Mac with a different external enclosure and he could read each of them fine (09:38). Maybe the encryption is optional when configuring the My Book Duo or what you explained only happens on new models (I noticed that this video is 2 years old and your comment is more recent)?
i think he test it in other mybook dou still same type and brand
If it was the chip that got fried, surely it wouldn't have worked again as he says it did?
@@edwardcullen3251 Perhaps the encryption is unique to each enclosure?
I´m working from my WD Duo drive, doing video editing. Will this burn my WD duo? My projects are about 200-300 GB, but once transferred to my DUO I from there.. not transferring anything back and forth so to speak
Very informative, thank you very much for the heads up on this. 👍
I performed a soft reboot on mine and my shares no longer appear on the web console. oddly, the share i created on the attached usb drive does still appear.
im gonna look for fix, or attempt disk recovery.
did you try plugin it into a windows PC? Maybe it would have let you recover EXFAT?
Thank you for this story. I have a similar experience with external SSD. I formated it to exFat use it on Mac and when I plug it to PC error popup shows that the disk needs to be checked. I did the test (it takes a few seconds) and when it finished one of my folder (35GB of video footage) was gone. I tried to save the data but without luck. One guy from the data recovery company tells me that exFat isn't very reliable file system. It brings both worlds (Mac and PC) together but neither works 100%.
Mine is on ex fat and but had a power outage and the WD tools found that disk 2 failed so have just had to purchase a new red 6 TB drive also run a mac
can i only use exfat if i'm on windows?
Did you try to read the xFAT on a Windows machine?
This experience is very valuable. I am also in this problem as I us my WD Mypassport as exFAT and one day it just disappeared from either Mac and PC. So I tried to googled and did a lots of research and I found nothing.
Anyway, thanks to shared your experience and solution. All the best!
So what other little traps are there in this product so when I can't get my data it will be blamed on me.
Does anyone know what is the format of these NAS Drive's hard drives? I purchased a new 4TB hard drive by Seagate, but when I put that inside this WD MyBook Duo enclosure, it never sees this new drive. I tried taking out both and only put the new one, still a standing yellow light at front. I have tried to format the drive in all know formats, like exFat32, FAT32, NTFS, etc, etc, but no use. Please help guys.
WD is not a disc neutral NAS, MyBook Duo only supports WD hard disk drives. In fact you are held to ransom with nearly all WD products as they only support their own HDD. For the MyBook Dup WD RED Plus is the recommended way to go.
Just took delivery of one.
So exfat is ok if I use Windows 10. In fact is it the only option.
I'm curious to know if you now put one working drive (with hfs+) out of you WD book into a dock, if you can read the data ?
I think it would be completely useless to have 2 drives, when the case brakes, you can no longer acces any of the drives! I would't be to happy if I had to buy a complete new WD book (for as long as they are available!) to acces the data on a broken device.
If so, do you know of any other options ? I'm thinking to attach 2 drives (sata to usb3 enclosure) to an "old" imac and let MacOs do the raid1, but even then I'm not sure what happens if one drive fails.
Edit: Thanks for the warning!
Maximum usable space available in wd my book duo 20tb??????
18tb
Good Video, Good Information
As a long time RAID user with years of experience with failed hard drives, I would recommend that users do the following
1. WD My Book Duos Are Good Units, But Hard Drives Fail. Prepare for failure.
2. RAID1 Is Not a Backup System. All RAID1 does is provide a one disk failure tolerance, e.g., if one disk in the enclosure fails, then the 2nd disk should be recoverable. If the whole enclosure fails or the Mac file structure is unstable, then you are FUBAR.
3. Backup Using the 3-2-1 Rule. Three Backups, two onsite, and one offsite. I find it hard to believe that an IT guy like this uploader only had one, a single copy of his important personal data. That is a rookie mistake. For around $10 per month, many companies offer unlimited cloud storage. Oh, and I have made that mistake too, by the way.
4. Consider Using a NAS for Backup (Network Available Storage). There are some good ones out there, and they utilized your network accessible through your LAN by a Cat5 hooked to your switch or router. RAID0 and Raid1 are both options. Synology is a well accepted brand, but is not easy to set up. Again, a NAS is only part of a backup plan (3-2-1), so one always has four copies of everything.
This is a really good video, well presented and I was impressed by the uploader's ability to problem solve.
Hi Tom, thanks for sharing your knowledge. Which unlimited cloud storage would you recommend?
I have the same issue.. except that my drive was formatted as HFS+J... so the issue may not be related to ExFat after all. Any ideas if data could be recovered if the format was HFS+J ?
Same me 6TB
Not sure if this helps but maybe WD used SMR disks that save multiple information in one track and you had a bad luck of turning it off during read-modify-write cycle of some critical partition / filesystem data and it got damaged? Google SMR disks to find more on that
This happened to me a few months ago and I landed in this video. My My Book Duo was also exfat. Just today, I decided to change the power source... I took my cord from my LED production lights and bam! It works again. I think it needed more power, it's the only thing I can think of.
Hey, thank you for the Video. I have a problem and maybe you can help me. My wife has two of these My Book 8T Raid. One has Green HDD´s and one Red HDD´s. Now after some years on of the Green HDD´s is not waking up. So we might have to replace it. The questions is, can i replace a Green HDD with a Red HDD ? because the Red ones are only half the price. Thank you ! (we have the thunderbolt version)
Thanks for confirming an issue that I suspected was the problem with a 3TB WD Essentials external drive that I bought back in 2012 and tried to "resurrect" in 2019. I had formatted it exFAT in order to have a Mac user transfer a bunch of graphics files onto it for me to view on a PC (running Win7 OS). It had worked back then for about 2 years... then I didn't touch it again until 2019. Connected the USB to the PC and Windows 10 did not FULLY recognize the external hard drive (the icon popped-up in the devices area once connected, but NO FILES were detected in Windows Explorer). I tried reformatting it, but that option was greyed-out as if the drive was a corrupted flash disk. So now it's in an E-Waste bin out of my life. I'm thinking of getting the one that you showed in the video though.
You’re right man. It’s super difficult finding a solution for an unmountable Mybook Duo online and WD is useless when it comes to support. My drive wouldn’t mount but was visible in Disk Utilities so I opened WD drive utilities and as I was doing the quick drive test it magically showed up on my desktop. I have no idea what solved the problem but I’m glad to have my info back. Definitely will stay away from EXFat
I had wd my book and found it hardware uses special format and taking disk out and hooking up to Mac and windows both didn't see it, then I put the board from enclosure back on drive and started working again and then backed up everything and not trust drive or hard ware from mybook. Now I get drives that don't use special formating hardware.
Thanks so much for sharing your story, I myself bought these and I will defenintely go for JBOD and no exFat. Thanks for helping me avoid problems down the line, thought it was cheap for WD Red drives without a catch.
JBOD pleas don’t do this.
JBOD is worse then RAID 0 !
JBOD gives you no security whatsoever.
He was talking about HFS+J VS ExFAT not JBOD!
If you want to know about how to set up a real backup solution see my other comment to the author of the video.
Will Disk Drill restore a RAID disk?
I found one of these at work. I run a small business and someone turned this in after they seen the WD My Book Duo fall out of someones car. I don't have any security footage to return to owner. What can I do with this? lol
I'm glade you were able to figure out what was the problem.. Looks like these MBD are available anymore.. I see a new version the two tone colors now.. WD don't even have the one you are talking about on their site anymore.. I guess they know these was an issue... thxs for the story....
This is awesome dude! thanks for share this!!
Thanks so much for sharing, very helpful info!
GREAT video. I have been using the Mac since 1984 and done tons of professional IT consulting, etc. This video was perfect and made me feel much better about using this as my Time Machine backup in a RAID 0 configuration.
How many of these have you had fail BTW? I noticed it does not have a fan... do they run hot?
Thanks.
Zero-G Raid 0 aaaaaargh, especially for a professionnal backup. Raid 1 or Raid 6 are the way to go....
I do not know about Mac apps, but in windows with EASEUS data recovery app, I was able to extract most of the data most of the times even if the disc is formated.... Maybe with the app you can still recover most of your data.
6:20 Just here as a reminder for myself if I ever need to watch this bit again, don't mind me
i learned that mistake for one of my drives years ago so i always format my drives in hfs journaled and apfs now. also have one external as exfat when i need to use it for windows which i hardly ever do.
Great Video because i was looking at a 44 TB western digital to buy and even though this video is old it still relates to my potential purchase. Thank you very much👊🏻👊🏻
Hey, would you sell one of your enclusres to me? My enclosure died and is not produces anymore. I cannot access my data.
I have an external drive with HFS+ (journalled), *twice* now the 8TB drive has become corrupt and read only. Sure, it's nice that I can still access the files, but copying across 6TB of stuff to another drive to reformat is a pain. HFS+ (journalled) is extremely brittle if you unplug it by accident several times (e.g. in my case it's plugged into my laptop and I knocked the cable out by accident a few times) - I was actually going to format as exFAT next time as it seems less brittle to unexpected unplugging.
Salut, je suis après car je suis en grosse galère ! Je suis photographe et j'ai mon my book duo qui à disparu d'un coup de mon folder ! (sur mac donc) Je pensais qu'en ayant choisi le mode RAID 1, cela m'aurait permis de pouvoir connecter au moins un des deux DD directement sans le raid en SATA pour pouvoir récupérer mes fichier facilement! Mais non aucun des deux DD n'apparaît sur Mac ou Windows... Est ce que quelqu'un sait si c'est normal? Que un DD crame ok mais les deux en même temps ?! Possible? Enfin je ne vois pas trop l'utilité de faire un RAID si pour ne pas pouvoir récupérer ses fichiers ensuite... Le pire c'est que l'application WD Drive utilities me dit que tout vas bien ! J'ai donc fait un scan avec Wondershare recoverit sur mon mac où j'arrive à voir mes photos et dossiers mais une fois que je les récupères elles sont illisibles ... Je vais maintenant passer par un pc et faire la meme manip pour voir si les photos seront lisibles après la récup... Je l'espère... Si quelqu'un à l'explication à mon problème et une solution je suis preneur ! :)
Merci !
And what happens when one disk fails? Does the utility tell you which disk failed? How does it go about rebuilding the array after you give it a new empty drive instead of one that failed???
This is very useful info! Thanks!
I think I have the same problem, i just switched to mac and my MyBook duo works very well on my PC but it can't mount on my mac
i need help i have 20 tb hard dirive and both unallocated i need help pls
i have a problem with western, lost everything cause of a bad enclosure, the problem is they encrypt the data and its board specific so you cant swap the board or take the disk out, be sure your data is not encrypted in hardware level before you lose everything
Omg, I have a 2TB Seagate GoFlex Drive from 2010, haven't used it 24/7, just plug it in via USB2.0 when I backup, it was originally formatted in NTFS, thankfully Seagate has an NTFS driver for Mac. But just as of late, the drive has been locking up on Mac after about 2 minutes. I tried plugging it into a Windows PC, and the directories appear, but they're all empty. I have a feeling it's similar to your issue with file structure. I can use ls via terminal on my Mac and I check console and it keeps saying fseventsd/ wasn't unlocked properly last time in Mac console. Been looking at NAS drives for awhile now. The market has been really slow to come out with something like WD's My Cloud Home.
You need to do the 3v mod if you take them out of the enclousure. Then they will appear as normal.
What do you mean? How would you do that, and before or after taking them out?
WD 28 TB My Book Duo Desktop Raid USB 3.1 External Hard Drive & Auto Backup Software, in Black...
Is what I've bought. But I haven't even unboxed it yet, much less formatted the duel drives. So a big thanks going out to you, for this warning!
I wish I had seen this video last year. Came here because two of my My Book Duos mysteriously became permanently invisible a couple months after formatting as ExFat... :'(
Maybe just make it to have an drive letter to show up, in Windows. ?
My drive is make all sorts of noises, backed up everything on other drives. Can't find anything on what's going on.
Sounds like your drives are fukt u stooge
@@Crazy--Clown Well no shiiiit
Very interesting video, I have a WD MyBook Duo for a couple of years and very often I am getting RAID configuration errors that I fix by removing power and putting it back again (the power button is not a physical switch). I am using this drive with a Mac and I formatted it as APFS with RAID 0. I was having the project to re-format it as another filesystem as I suspected APFS was the reason of the issue, and your video is kind of confirming I should try another filesystem (not ExFat after your experience)!
I can't say for sure that APFS is also a problem for this device but...
Thanks for your video!
Dang!! I did exactly what you did. I should have watched this 3 years ago. Great video, thank you much.
the Amazon link it is saying USB 3 Will it work with USB3.1
FRANK R ICE COLD yes it will, just not as fast as the port can do. It is like when everyone went up to USB 3, you can still use a USB 1 or 2 device just not as fast as the port is capable of. Hope that helps!
thanks
FRANK R ICE COLD no problem
I think you exFAT issue was spot on. I had a USB stick do the exact same thing. It just disappeared as being a drive. exFAT formatted. I think that's the reason.
That happened with a Lacie drive that was xfat and I tried everything and ended up going into Terminal to mount the drive, and after trying several different ways in terminal it finally worked.
Hellovery useful information!! Thank you very much!
Does anyone daisy chain these effectively?
📹 Great vids
👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
Very insightful & helpful
Thanks a lot bro, it helps me :)
This just happened to me. Was moving all my files onto a NAS and the WD just died. Got a RAID failure message which now doesn’t show up at all. No utility will recover it.
So you at no point realizing it was on exfat, tried to use a Windows PC to see the drive? Jees, mac users.
@kryptoday exFAT doesn't support journaling, so the filesystem can get corrupted when the drive loses power during a write process. On Windows the file system can be repaired by running `chkdsk X: /f` or `chkdsk X: /r` (with "X" being the volume letter of the affected drive). Windows normally recognizes the corrupted filesystem itself and asks if it should check and repair the affected drive when you plug it in.
As far as I know repairing a corrupted exFAT file system is not possible on other operating systems.
@kryptoday It's because he's an idiot.
I’m watching this 4 years later, only stumbled across it b/c I’m researching the enclosure/about to pull the trigger on a refurb for $170 USD (2TB, but I’d be using 2x SSD)
Getting my popcorn ready for when part 2 comes out and it’s “HFS+ VS APFS, lololol.
hey stronz, sorry to hear about your troubles. Next time if you do run into failures you can run a live cd ( that means not installing it, but just to use the os ) of ubuntu, fedora, or some other linux distro, and use root and file manager nautilus. chances are Linux will see it. this has happened to me in the past.
Thanks for the tip! These files were not that important so giving up was ultimately the easiest solution but if it had been professional work I would have definitely tried every obscure method for recovery possible.
Thanks for the information Great video ;)
Using one of these devices is good, but YOU HAVE TO BACKUP THE RAID DEVICE ITSELF. I believe RAID devices are more meant for convenience of use than full blown backup solutions. You can back them up to an attached USB device, a cloud backup, or another My Cloud device (assuming your device supports these options).
Also, rather than buying many of these MyBook Duos, you could get bigger My Cloud devices, like a PR4100 with 32TB, etc. Then you could run two of them and back them up to each other, therefore you would have only two devices instead of 12, but they would still be redundant to each other. It might makes things simpler.
Side note: I'm a network guy, I would have been interested if you looked in your router or used a program like PingInfoView to ping your whole network subnet, to see if that MyBookDuo was still online but at a different IP or just locked up or whatever. Sounds like it was just down, given your story, but I would have also checked that.
Lastly, I was wondering if there is a way to check what type of file format was used in setting up the system? I have a My Cloud Mirror and I can't remember what file format I selected... if I was even given that option... because honestly I don't remember that part. I just setup a My Cloud PR4100 yesterday and don't remember that option with that device either. Maybe this is more related to the MyBook Duo's?
Exactly right, RAID is not a backup. If data is valuable, back it up.
How about the warranty? As they are suppose to recover the data for you.
Sir. Fun Hello, no they are not supposed to.
Why are is no one using Synology system ?
because they use intel dying atom chips, because they use proprietary psus and overall system, hard to service/hard to repair.
no proper ZFS support (correct me if i'm wrong here).
ZFS is what u want to avoid corruption and data loss, unlike basic raid 5/6 hardware or software raid 5/6.
price and upgradability!
the cheapest synology nas with 8 bays costs 700 euros!!! without drives of course.
for that money u can build your own ZFS file server with the capability to grow even far beyond 8 bays later on.
and it has the advantage of running ZFS instead of shity old raid 5/6.
sooooooooo as u can see there are many reasons.
Great video. Really good info to know. I will stick with the Apple file system.
Great info. Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna use 2 of these on a Windows machine so I'll probably reformat to NTFS instead of using the DEFAULT exFAT format these ship with. I dunno if exFAT is as unreliable on Win as MacOS, but no reason to take a chance. Thx again.
What happened? Any problems? Did you finally use NTFS? I'd appreciate a lot your experience!
@@intheskyaerials Sorry, but I ended up buying a different version of the WD drive and "shucked" the drives so my experience prob won't help U, since I'm using my WD drives in an unintended manner. But yes, I did format my drives as NTFS and haven't had any issues. But again, I am NOT using them inside their USB enclosures as they're intended to be used. I shucked my drives & added them to my server. I've bought 7x 6-10TB WD Elements versions instead of the My Book Duo featured in this video. I went with the Elements version b/c they are better for shucking as they don't include any drive encryption hardware or software on the USB host adapter that might complicate the shucking process.
@@EricS-uf9mv I see.. well thanks anyway and I'm glad that you found a solution that worked for you!
And you never tried the "broken" HDD on a Windows PC, right?
C0L0RMAN spot on!!! Btw stay away from interior mac filesystems and downlevel windows compatible filesystems like extfat. Ntfs is the best. Ifag!!!
as someone who uses mac's and windows, and have had problems with exfat drives in mac after like an accidental pull out etc, usually they load up straight away in windows, run checkdsk on them and then they work fine on the mac again
@willy wonder
ntfs is a dumpsterfire, that we (inc me) only use, because microsoft criminally refused to support BETTER file systems like ext4 by default or in general, as one has to remember, that microsft sees gnu + linux as a disease, they want to irradiate, hence the war on any open good stuff like ext4.
NTFS is just all we got, no reason to cheer on the prison bars with the goal to forget who put u there and the goal to forget the freedom and better shit, that has been held from u.....
and let's not even talk about how ZFS type file systems should be the true goal, because of checksums and what not.
@@maxtorsumitomo6249 You're an idiot. NTFS was stolen from DEC and is ancient.
Hey I've just solved a similar issue! After much research and trying different things, I removed one of the hard drives and booted the My Book Duo with only 1 hard disk and plugged into my PC. It now had 2 red lights (a flashing power red light and a solid HD red light on the missing drive) but it was totally recognized by my PC and I could access all files and info! If you are having this issue this is worth a try!
Great to know for those with access to a PC. Thanks for the tip!
After your suggestion I tried the same thing (removing 1 HD) and plugged it into my mac and it worked! Thank you!!
@@matthewherrmann474 yeahh!!!!
Great video. Love you.
I am using an external hard drive enclosure with RAID1 as well on a Mac, and I did formatted them to use exFAT. Granted, I did acknowledge the limitations for exFAT due to its lack of file system journaling. Although, at least for my use case I just use it as a "bulk transfer" drive between me and my other classmates who uses Windows, and its been working fine for a past year.
So, after watching this, I'd say that you CAN use exFAT for RAID1 but ONLY for a TRANSFER drive or NON-CRITICAL data.
Cheers :)
I had the same issue, and same result research I was only able to get some data back using test disk/photorec my system was Windows. I will avoid exfat
I just had a problem with my MyBook Duo, which suddenly failed and became inaccessible (I'm also on Mac). Unmounting the drive and cycling its power brought it back online, but then it soon reported that one drive had failed. I actually think it had just overheated because I was writing data to it constantly for several hours, but now I'm replacing the "failed" disk (with a non-SMR WD Red Plus of the same capacity).
I use the duo in RAID1 for availability, but I back it up to another disk and also online to BackBlaze (which I highly recommend). As several people here have stressed, RAID is *not* backup. If you have a software problem, or delete something accidentally, RAID does not provide an extra copy to recover from.
Always remember: RAID is not backup, it's resiliency. When using RAID 1 and onwards it's about being able to take drive failure without losing the dataset, it won't help you if you delete a file or if it becomes corrupt or you wish to revert to a prior version of a file.
alpha xion Would you care to suggest a backup solution rather than patronising those with less knowledge than you then?
Of course RAID is a backup, what nonsense.
@@daltonrandall4348 It's not a backup, largely because there's no historical data. If the data in your RAID array is corrupted you've lost that data. It is purely for resiliency should any drives in your array fail.
I hope you're not IT for where you work, because if you rely on RAID as a backup you have no backup.
@@alphaxion That's like saying if a nuclear bomb goes off at the super secure bank vault where you've stored your backup, you've lost that data. Of course if the backup gets destroyed you lose the backup... you're stating the obvious.
Looks like one of these and a single matching sized 3rd external.......
Hi Stronz, thank you very much for sharing your story. I am on the verge of buying one of these arrays and this is very useful information.
I'm also a Mac user.
Another question: is this system hot-swappable?
+Mario C. Castillion I wouldn't consider it hot swappable. You only want to be moving the drives when something has gone wrong. The ideal and intended use is to leave the pair of drives alone as long as they are working and functional.
Thank you for your fast reply. Appreciate it, man.
I'm ordering this drive for sure.
Keep those very informative videos coming.
It's great you figured out the problem but you wouldn't have lost the data had you just tried to plug the drive into a windows pc and then format it once you retrieved the data.
You think he would have recovered for sure?
Ex-FAT is only used for transferring files ( one & done ) from a Windows file system to a Mac IOS