Disk Utility only for drive management?

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

I have a My Book Thunderbolt Duo 4TB on order and have a very important question about managing the drive.

When I receive the drive I plan to simply take it out of the box, plug it in to my iMac running Mavericks (and soon to be upgraded to Yosemite), and then manage it using Disk Utility.  I need a direct answer to a few simple questions:

  1. Is there still a risk of data loss when using this brand new WD drive with Mavericks or Yosemite?  Or, has the cause of the serious Mavericks compatibility problem been determined conclusively and resolved?

  2. Can the My Book Thunderbolt Duo be fully managed using Apple’s Disk Utility alone or does it require the WD Software applications?  I do not under any circumstances want to install WD software on my Mac.  I plan on using Disk Utility to immediately change the default RAID 0 to a RAID 1 configuration, then repartition and reformat to a single HFS+J volume before starting to use the drive for storage.  Is this possible without installing any WD software?

  3. Does the WD drive do hardware RAID, software RAID, or is it just presenting the two drives to the Mac OS which then performs the software RAID?

  4. When a physical drive fails (in RAID 1), and I’m not using WD Drive Utilities, will the drive simply rebuild the RAID volume automatically once I’ve replaced the failed drive?  If not, can this also be managed using Disk Utility or will WD Drive Utilities be necessary?

Thanks in advance to anyone that can provide clear and authoritative answers to these important questions.

2

Welcome to the community FishingAddict. 

  1. There are no problems of this kind. 

  2. Yes, you can use the Disk Utility to change the RAID type, but the only supported way is using the WD Drive Utily.

  3. I don’t have information on this, I recommend you to contact tech support for this one. 

http://support.wdc.com/country/index.asp

  1. You can also use Disk Utility to rebuilt the RAID but just like with changing the RAID type it is only supported using the WD Drive Utility.

Note that when I say that it is not supported it doesn’t mean that you will necessarily encounter any problems, but WD tech support cannot assist you when using 3rd party software. 

3

Thanks for the clear answer.  That puts me more at ease.