WD MyBook 500GB hard driver replacement

I have a WD MyBook WD5000Avvs-63Zwb0, but the hard drive is dead :frowning:

Can I replace it with an other WD disk? Maybe with a bigger one, for example 2TB?

If drive is still in warranty you can ask for replacement w/ the same drive.

No warranty :frowning:

I have this same question.

WD5000AAVS drive (500GB Caviar Green) in a My Book Premium Edition II 1 TB enclosure.

The manual warns against going away from WDC drives (citing possible data loss), but doesn’t say if the firmware will support a larger drive–e.g. this one over the stock one.

An answer of, “no idea, good luck” is just not sufficient. I would hope that someone from Western Digital Support would look at this and realize that this issue is driving sales and loyalty.

Great question, as this will drive my next two purchases, and probably yours as well.

Since last posting, I have discovered that WD MyBook dual-drive units use a sort of soft-RAID (storing configuration information on the drive rather than letting the hardware figure out where the bits should go).

It would appear, therefore, that if these units would support larger hard disk drives (unclear), the order of operations would be these:

  1. Replace your 500GB failed drive with a WD green 500GB drive. I picked up a WD5000AZRX new on sale, and that’s working with this unit.
  2. Connect power only to the unit, and let it rebuild overnight.
  3. Connect the unit to a data connection (computer).
  4. Copy all your data.
  5. Disconnect the unit and replace these 500GB drives with a matched-set of larger drives.
  6. Configure the new drives in the WD utility (e.g. mirror or JBOD).
  7. Copy your data onto your new array.

Steps 1 and 2 should recover your data (if you’re running a mirror configuration); Steps 3-7 will migrate this data to the new, larger, array if the drives are supported by the firmware.

Unfortunately, I see no evidence to support this. I believe that WD’s official stance is to replace failed drives with those of exactly the same capacity–and from Western Digital.

I sent back an external drive (MyBook), where the drive had failed after 8 months. The replacement unit was also a MyBook, but the disk capacity was larger, and the interface was now USB3 instead of USB2.

YMMV.

OP’s unit is out of warranty (see here).

vlevi, I had been working under the assumption that this was a dual-drive unit. I now think this assumption is wrong and that your data is gone no matter what you do.

Unfortunately, I still don’t know if you can install a larger drive in your WD MyBook enclosure than the size with which it shipped, but responses around the WD Community range from, “no” to “possibly, but I don’t know.”

I have not seen a thread where WD is forthcoming with this answer, nor technical limitations within the MyBook product line that would permit/preclude this option.

Sorry.

“that this was a dual-drive unit.”

No, it is a single disk MyBook Essential.

Re: WD MyBook 500GB hard driver replacement

I have a WD MyBook WD5000AAKX-603CA0, but the hard drive is dead 

Can I replace it with an other WD disk?