Has anybody had any success with putting large amounts of data on their MyBookLive Duos and not losing it?
Here’s why I ask…
- I had a 6TB unit in a mirrored RAID 1 configuration (2x3TB Green Drives) - enclosure trashed both drives simultaneously after I transferred a couple terabytes to it (both drive unrecognizable in and out of enclosure).
After sending it off for data recovery and RMA replacement I got back some of my data and the same unit with a slight upgrade - came with 2x3TB Red Drives (in RAID 0 striped configuration - uggh). I have yet to do anything with this unit except copy off my recovered data to a couple of 2TB drives. When I’m confident my data is secure and backed up I’ll have to reformat the MyBookLive Duo for RAID Mirror (assuming I can trust it again). However I probably won’t put an working files on there that aren’t backed up somewhere else first.
- As part of preparing for the data recovery backups and transfers I purchased a 3TB Green drive (in an offbrand external SATA enclosure). After finally figuring out how to format this for the full 3TB capacity and seeing many of the horror stories about 3TB drive incompatibilities along the way I got really skittish of any >2TB units. I figured I had it formatted okay so I went ahead and started putting data onto this 3TB drive. Considering this was going to be just a copy once and offsite archive drive I wasn’t concerned as much. After many days of data transfers I was let down when I woke up one morning to see the last copy didn’t complete. When I tried to continue the transfer I started getting corrupt file/folder errors. I rebooted the machine and voila - the entire boot record was corrupted.
Western Digital has been making my data disappear like an evil magician - uggh!
I am attempting a recommended Linux based recovery operation on the 3TB external SATA drive being I thought that would be quicker than the many days of data transfers I just did. If the recovery doesn’t work I think I’ll be tossing this 3TB drive out the window.
All of this gives me zero confidence in anything with 3TB drives - especially the 6TB MyBookLive Duo. If I put more than 2TB of data on there can I expect another crash as well?
Sure, no drive system is foolproof and should be backed up. Have you ever tried backing up a 6TB drive with horrendous data transfer rates like the Duo? I can’t imagine how long that would take. By the time it finished it would probably be time to run the next months backup.
Anybody have any success stories with these units that can overcome my fears? I may just part out the drives in my Duo or sell it outright.
