My Book World Edition II Hard Drives

I am looking to get a My Book Edition II with 1tb drive.  I have three questions regarding the MBE II.

  1. I want to upgrade the stock 1tb drive to 2tb drive.   Can I upgrade the hard drives in this particular model?  

  2. Which drives would I use?  Make and model.

  3. Once I replace the drives, how do I perform a factory reset on the new drives?

Thanks.

Hello,

I don’t recommend replacing the internal drives with other that the same model as drives that were included. Using larger drives or different models might not work.

Why would I not be able to replace them.  It is silly for WD to make a product where you can’t upgrade the drives.  I am only going from 1 to 2 tb.  It is not a huge leap.  If the MBWE come with 2 x 500 green drives then why can’t I replace them with 2 x 1tb green drives?  The drives would be the same model.  It doesn’t make sense.

Hi pfisher,

I recently asked the same question in the MB Live forum and got some good answers. The reason it’s not as simple as it might at first seem is that the drive’s OS lives on the hard disk, so if you simply swapped in a different drive it just wouldn’t boot. At the simplest, highest level what you’d need to do is:

  • format the new drive to match the partitions and formats of the existing MBWE one

  • transfer all the content from all partitions to the new drive

  • grow the data partition on the new drive to use up the free space on the drive

Actually doing the above in entirely non-trivial though. The best method I can think of is to use the wholly excellent ‘featurepacks’ developed by teinturman at highlevelbits.fr that add functionality to the MBWE. There is one that allows you to use the USB socket to plug in an external drive to perform a mirror backup of the MBWE drive. In this way you could insert a larger drive in the external, run the backup, grow the data partition (using GParted on the System Rescue CD for example - Google for details) then swap the external drive into the MBWE.

The above is my plan anyway!

Cheers,

Ian

I don’t understand why you can’t replaced the 1tb drive with 2tb and perform a factory reset.   You take the 2 x 500gig drives out and put in 2 x 1gig drives in the unit and connect the MBWE to a computer to perform the factory recovery.  I would think by performing a factory reset, that would take care of the formatting and partitions?