I just purchased a MyBook Duo 16TB to use as an 8TB mirrored drive with RAID 1. I am interested to know whether- in the event of an enclosure failure- your drives can be moved to a new WD MyBook Duo enclosure with the data intact. I’m reading a lot about hardware encryption making the drives unrecoverable (without great expense) in the event of an enclosure failure, and it’s making me nervous about my purchase.
Are you able to swap your drives into a different MyBook Duo enclosure and recover your data? Is updated installed firmware an obstacle? Any concerns with MyBook Duo enclosures built for different size drives utilizing differing power supplies? For example, if I purchased a 4TB (2x2TB) MyBook Duo, could I then swap my 16TB MyBook Duo (2x8TB) drives into that enclosure? I like the idea that I can replace one drive in my original enclosure if I experience a drive failure. Just want to make sure that, in the unlikely event of an enclosure failure, I won’t have lost everything, or incurred a huge amount of hassle.
Hi vvrounder,
In case of an enclosure failure of WD My Book Duo device you can move the drives to a different enclosure of the same model but since the WD My Book duo device has hardware encryption on it, the drive will be formatted which is data destructive. A hardware RAID device provides its own controller to manage each hard drive, the file system used within the array, and the media written to and read from the array. Hardware RAID controllers are specific to each model and make enclosure. However, if only one of the drives fails in RAID 1 (mirrored RAID) then you can replace that drive with a new identical drive to rebuild the RAID. Replacement hard drives must be an exact Model-for-Model match with the hard drives originally shipped with the device from the factory.
For example, A WD Green model WD30EZRX-00SPEB0 must be replaced with another WD Green model WD30EZRX-00SPEB0 to function properly. Exchanging the hard drive with a different model or capacity may cause unexpected behavior, such as data loss or damage to the operating system and will void the warranty.
New WD My Book Duo enclosures support maximum capacity up to 20 TB (2 X 10 TB). If you purchased a 4 TB (2 X 2 TB) WD My Book Duo, then you could swap your 16 TB WD My Book Duo (2 X 8 TB) drives into that enclosure but again those drives will be reformatted by the enclosure due to hardware encryption and the data will be erased.
If the enclosure fails and you have important data on the drives then to recover that data you will need to visit a professional data recovery center. You can check the data recovery centers recommended by the WD from the link mentioned below:
This topic is old now, but at work, we have 3 of these drives. On one system, one is used to share files out to some people. I have another one exactly like it connected also. Basically, we have an unlimited dropbox account, and have dropbox synced onto the backup drive. I have a robocopy script that runs each night that checks the data drive for changes and syncs all the files and any changes into the dropbox folder on the secondary drive.
That said, we had one of the drives in the primary mybookduo fail. I was able to get another WD 8tb from Best Buy, I doubt they are exactly the same model, but so far it seems to be rebuilding the array. So I guess I’ll find out what happens, but that’s how it’s set up right now. Eventually I want to get everyone onto OneDrive as with our Office 365 plan we now have OneDrive space for every user.
I think I know the answer to this but wanted to try and see if their is a solution. My world book duo enclosure has failed and obviously the data on my raid drives is still on it and need to get it off. What’s the best way to get the info off?
