WD My Book Duo RAID1 WARNING!

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.

Snapchat: @StronzV

[seagullstoriesbylucya.faze]

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!

[tommccurnin]

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.

[IvanIvoMartinetti]

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

[CHICANO]

Good info., but you probably could've told us all that in 3-5 mins

[BlenderRookie]

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.

[agnessas]

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 :(

[NathanCarroll_SLB]

Thank you for sharing! I'm glad I found this before I configured my new drive.

[misterheavy]

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.

[phil_aus]

6:20 Just here as a reminder for myself if I ever need to watch this bit again, don't mind me

[nprA]

I don't have a Mac however I do have a MyCloud device with RAID, however I found your video very helpful. Ignore these negative comments about length of your video.

[lmacatol]

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.

[Thealex]

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

[milohajek]

I am a CIS-System Administrator, not a bad job but you could have explained it all in about 2-5 minutes

[marsdahustler]

long ass story. literally could have summed it up in 2 minutes.

[shyrochanning]

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!

[marditoon]

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👊🏻👊🏻

[steveg]

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.

[davidtverberg]

Dang!! I did exactly what you did. I should have watched this 3 years ago. Great video, thank you much.

[Springer]

Everyone is talking about exFAT (in isolation) but, given the "it's apple's way or the highway" nature apple devices I suspect it is far more likely to be an apple problem with the apple devices corrupting exFAT (specifically) formats.
i'm guessing that there are millions of Mybook Duos out there happily using exFAT with other OSs. It's just with apple that the incompatibility shows up.

It is interesting that someone else here has commented how their Windows PC identified the error and fixed it. This implies to me that Apple's inability (unwillingness?) to "play nice" with anything not proprietry is at the heart of this. So the moral of the story for me

Good video and very well presented. Well done for potentially saving others a lot of grief.

[kodiakandgrizzlybears]

This footage is very informative regarding hardware encryption!!