I have been using the My Book drives for years now. I have also experienced lots and lots of drive failures. And with those failures, too much lost data. This past week, I purchased a Synology NAS. The mission is to recover as many drives and data as possible. Then I am yanking all of the drives out of the enclosures of the My Books and My Clouds and putting them into the Synology NAS in order to create redundant RAIDs.
So far, I’ve gone through 12 My Books, and only 3 drives are still working (and have survived block level scans). They are still running, but two have 870 and 1320 bad blocks each. As you would imagine, not a reliable pair.
The My Clouds are holding up better. Of the 5 My Clouds, 3 of them are still running. I have not removed them from the chassis yet (scheduled for later this week), but believe they will have better success.
I’m most impressed with the 6Tb White My Cloud. It turns out that the 6Tb uses a Red NAS drive while all of the others are Green drives.
So far I’ve got a lot of really strong magnets!