After having a great experience with the EX2 Ultra, I had expected the same great experience with the My Book Duo but instead of it being a dream machine, it was a nightmare.
I’ve used over a dozen My Books before and every one of them was an absolute delight. However being that this is my first My Book Duo, I had expected it to act in a manner much more similar to my EX2 where rebuilding the mirror drive would be automatic or perhaps manual with some kind of rebuild monitor on the WD utilities.
Of course all my tests are simulated by turning off the drive and yanking out one of the drive to simulate a drive going bad or perhaps just missing. Then turning it back on.
The My Book was perfectly fine operating with one drive along with a blinking red light. I then turned off the drive and re-inserted the drive.
The red light stayed flashing red.
The WD Utilities now thinks that the device is configured as JBOD. We had lost the mirror.
There was no rebuilding, No Mirror.
So if you lose a drive, it won’t rebuild automatically, or perhaps it is rebuilding by the blinking red lights, but there is no indicators that it is doing so. I am not waiting around.
Now this isn’t the really the horror of losing the mirror. Lets say it is a year down the road and you know that to recover You just need to find another drive to copy the data out or perhaps replace both drives and just copy the data back in since you lost the mirror, you need to re-create it instead of rebuilding it.
So replacing both drives to create a new mirror raid 1 and you mount the old drive that you removed and stick it into a usb dock so you can read the data to copy it back in. Nope, it is formatted in only two data formats provided by the utility and both of them are un-readable by the Mac which is linux.
The format is un-readable outside the Duo which means that to recover you need two duos, one to read the disk and one to create a new mirror.
The My Book Duo is totally useless.
At 3:00am I had pack it all up thinking that I will try to return this to Best Buy tomorrow. However I had a thought? perhaps all I need to do is format it as a Mac Journal and that would work?
The second try was worse then the first. The WD Utilities started to crash every time I formatted the drive. I sent the crash report (all ten of them to Apple). I then tried to format it as a Mac Disk with journal and that failed also.
So you really only get two choices for formatting? when in the world does a USB device limit you to what OS you format it to? I really think WD screwed up on this one. You should be able to format a USB drive to any format that you need. The mirroring is a hardware feature so it should be independent of the format.
I had enough at 4:00AM and this My Book Duo was a huge disappointment. I had thought it would go along well with my two EX2 with two 10TB gold drives. I was even going to try out using the 10TB drives within the Duo enclosure, but I never got very far.
I know that this My Book Duo has been discontinued and it no longer matters, but this also means that I will never consider looking at the new My Book Pros either because WD never deviates far from their original product designs.
I am really disappointed with WD now and there is a good chance that I should return everything, over a $1500 worth of merchandise. The reason? I simply cannot trust WD products even though I have been trusting them for the past 6 years but that is because I had two copies of my data in separate enclosures. Although I have two EX2 enclosures; one without disks in case of enclosure failure, I still have to maintain an extra data copy outside the one EX2 that has a mirror copy of my data because that if the EX2 fails, that is it. All my eggs in one basket. Just like the My Book Duo, one drive fails and now you don’t even have a mirror.
I really cannot believe that you cannot remove a drive and mount it in a usb dock to view the data. Who are they trying to protect?
The safeguard in the old days was that if any mirror drives fails, you actually have two copies of your data, one good and one bad but both should still be readable using a USB dock. WD has removed this ability from us all because they want to keep their format proprietary? or perhaps I just need to use a real linux system, no idea, but I don’t like it.
