I bought a brand new WD MBLD 4TB last week. It arrived Wednesday, I connected it up, switched it on, loaded the CD and away I went. The first job I did was to back up the start point. I then changed the settings from RAID 0 to RAID 1 and left it to complete overnight. The next morning I copied over several thousand files totaling 64Gb without any problems. I could see them and open them from the mapped drive (Z).
A while later I tried to copy some more, but strangely the drive was no longer there. I could not see it as either a “Z” or by using its full path name, nor could I use the browser to connect to it (neither Chrome nor IE). As my home laptop is still on XP I thought I’d try my son’s Windows 7 laptop. I still couldn’t map to the MBLD, but the Win 7 PC could see it as a media server and was able to play music from it.
Throughout all this time the MBLD was sitting there with a steady green light showing. Several forum posts here suggested trying a rest or if that failed then powering it down and back up again. So it held the reset button in for 4 seconds - no change. As nothing was writing to it, I unplugged the Ethernet cable from the NAS, waited 60 seconds (it was a bit longer) then switched off.
When I turned it back on the LED on the front returned to it’s steady green state, but I still couldn’t use the utility supplied on the CD to communicate with the device, nor could I map to it. Eventually I downloaded the WD Link Software and had a degree of success with that. It searched and found the device, but said it had failed. When I looked at the front of the MBLD the LED was steady red.
I powered it down again following the routine described above and then powered it back up. The LED on the front panel was green. I ran the WD Link Software again. It found the device, but then said it was initialising. It stayed like that for hours until I powered it down.
Any ideas what could be wrong? Error messages have been few and far between. Any that I have had related to the messages from the browser being rejected by the device.
Yeah, that sounds like a bad box, if I had to guess… Take it back and exchange it for a new one.
This time, take a few extra precautions:
Enable SSH on it FIRST THING OUT OF THE BOX. (Lots of posts on How To.)
Before putting any data on it, upgrade the firmware (if needed.)
Then do the RAID conversion.
I also recommend setting a STATIC IP address instead of using Automatic in the network configuration.
Thanks Tony.
As an update, I powered the MBLD back up when I got home - still couldn’t see it on the network. I followed the proceedure for a safe power down, took the B drive out, powered it back up, same thing. Powered down again, swapped the A drive with the B (putting the B drive in the A slot), powered back up and hey presto.
It could be seen by my network. I could use either the UI or WD Link Software. Everything appeared okay apart from the missing drive. I checked the firmware version and it the latest version, so I must have updated it when I first used it last week.
I have not set up SSH or a static IP yet as I want to get the thing running as it is without muddying the waters, although I have disabled access to it from “anywhere in the world” to quote WD.
I was thinking of putting it all back as it was and trying again, just because the whole thing has been a bit flaky from the start and I want to prove whether or not the A drive is at fault rather than the whole MBLD.
A further update to anyone interested.
The MBLD has been running with no issues for a couple of days now, albeit minus one drive. I powered it down today using the Shutdown option in the UI, then disconnected the patch lead and power. After a couple of minutes I powered it back up without doing anything to it. Everything was fine and it behave normally.
I then shut it down using the UI, etc., and removed drive B (still in the primary slot) and put drive A in its place. Powered it back up, but it was back how it was last week - outwardly it looked okay (steady green LED), but it couldn’t be seen by my network as previously described.
Drive B is back in and the MBLD is working again. Conclusion - faulty drive A. I haven’t tried the A drive in the secondary slot in case it corrupts the B drive. Does anyone have any thoughts on that?
I wouldn’t do it… The drive order is important to the RAID mapping.
If the drive is bad, then it must be SO bad that it’s hanging up the system instead of just doing a recovery on the drive.
If you have the capability, try putting the drive in your PC via a SATA cable and run a diagnostic on it.
If the diagnostic comes out bad, have the drive (just the HDD) replaced under warranty.
If the diagnostic comes out good, then wipe out ALL of the partitions. Just leave it as an unpartitioned / unformatted drive.
Shut down the MBLD, reinsert the disk in the correct bay, and power it back up and see.
If it STILL doesn’t work, then perhaps the SATA interface on the chassis is bad, and you’re better of exchanging the whole box, drives and all.
