Installed two 3TB drives into MyBook Studio Edition II, having problems

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
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Hi there– 

The original 1TB drives that came with my MyBook Studio Edition II (wd40000h2q-00) failed, so I went and got two 3TB WD green drives to replace them, and so far the WD Drive Manager (v2.3.1) can only show 2.2TB available, and not the typical 3ishTB or 6ish TB available if I set it up as RAID 0 or 1.

So if I re-configure the drives using the manager software, it still shows 2.2TB available either as RAID 0 or 1. 

Any help? 

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It might be possible if the disk drives are initialized individually as GPT as opposed to MBR prior to configuring the RAID type, However, I have not tested this myself. It is also possible the actual controller in the enclosure to be incompatible with large hard drive volumes and may not allow for the full size to be displayed. This is because the 6TB (2x 3TB) WD My Book Studio Edition II hard drive was released much later and may have different components and firmware to accommodate larger drives.

Regards,

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Featoffun,

A few things to try (in order to try):

  1. make sure the unit’s firmware is up to date. There is a Universal FW Updater avaliable, off the WD Support site. I just updated a couple units I had. Updates MUST be done when connected using USB. Updating doesn’t work if connected using Firewire or eSATA.

  2. Update your WD Drive Manager. The latest version I find on the WD Support site is version 3.1.0.14. 

OS-X’s Disk Utility should be able to undo MBR (thats will limit the supported size to 2.2TB). Try partitioning as HFS instead of MS-DOS or ExFAT. That should clear the MBR and use GUID partitioning.

I have had no problems getting 4TB drives to work in the MyBook Studio Edition II after updating. 

Enjoy!