I have a 2tb external my book enclosure. I need to setup mirroring so I need this drive to be dynamic.
When I remove the drive from the enclosure and install it in my server I can set the drive to dynamic. However, when I reinstall the drive in the enclosure my server no longer recognizes the drive. But if I use a different enclosure the server recognizes the green drive as dynamic and allows me to setup a mirror.
Is there a way to maybe disable the WD drivers so that I can use the enclosure as a simple external drive and set the drive and enclosure to dynamic? Or is there freeware that will allow me to set the external drive to dynamic?
Diskpart won’t allow me to set it dynamic but does allow me to set it to GPT. Can I mirror it this way?
Anyone know why using an external drive in a mirror is so bad? How hard is it to remember to boot with the external hooked up? And if you forget just repair the mirror…
I have a 2tb external my book enclosure. I need to setup mirroring so I need this drive to be dynamic.
When I remove the drive from the enclosure and install it in my server I can set the drive to dynamic. However, when I reinstall the drive in the enclosure my server no longer recognizes the drive. But if I use a different enclosure the server recognizes the green drive as dynamic and allows me to setup a mirror.
Is there a way to maybe disable the WD drivers so that I can use the enclosure as a simple external drive and set the drive and enclosure to dynamic? Or is there freeware that will allow me to set the external drive to dynamic?
Diskpart won’t allow me to set it dynamic but does allow me to set it to GPT. Can I mirror it this way?
I don’t think there’s anything you can do at all. WD drive enclosures for their Mybooks/Elements use a special controller to cheat Windows XP systems into recognizing drives larger than 2TB, plus the encryption.
Your best bet is to well, use another enclosure not related to WD.
The WD enclosures do this even when the drive is not bigger than 2TB?
As far as I know all USB MyBook drives behave this way because they share the same cases, and even with drives smaller than 2TB there’s still the encryption problem.
Maybe the Elements under 2TB behave differently because they use no encryption, and maybe the specific MyBook “AV” model that is used for multimedia, but no one here can give you a safe model to go to other than older drives (2008 and earlier than that).
You’d have to give more details, there are external drive enclosures with 2 drive bays made for RAID, if you are making an internal RAID configuration then that’s no problem. But making a RAID configuration with two drive on two separate cases? You’re looking for trouble there as RAID degradation is guaranteed since 2 cases would not be able to write to two drives at the same time to prevent a dead volume. Windows 8 can do it with storage spaces, but no other system can do it safely.
I have a 4 drive server. I am planning mirroring each drive to an external drive one at a time. My server allows me to disable each drive prior to boot. So I boot to the a slot and an external drive. Then I can boot to the b slot and an external drive.
This appears to work but each time I shutdown and reboot the mirror shows a redundancy issue even though the data is there. Guess I need to break the mirror to verify the data…
Then it takes a huge amount of time to resync the drives. Do I need to break the mirror prior to shutdown? I’m looking for a way to shutdown the server without the mirror showing the redundancy issue and requiring resync…
I have a 4 drive server. I am planning mirroring each drive to an external drive one at a time. My server allows me to disable each drive prior to boot. So I boot to the a slot and an external drive. Then I can boot to the b slot and an external drive.
This appears to work but each time I shutdown and reboot the mirror shows a redundancy issue even though the data is there. Guess I need to break the mirror to verify the data…
Then it takes a huge amount of time to resync the drives. Do I need to break the mirror prior to shutdown? I’m looking for a way to shutdown the server without the mirror showing the redundancy issue and requiring resync…
That’s not normal at all. Either the 4 drive controller is bad, or the drives are not fully compatible with it. No healthy RAID volume should ever require to be split in shut down or power on operations.
When I’m syncing the drives in disk mgmt both drives have a red bar all the way across in the disk0 disk1 area. When the sync completes I shutdown with the internal drive in slot A and the external drive connected. Then I restart and go back into disk mgmt and see the drives show not redundant and the internal drive has a bar all the way but the external drive shows a broken bar where 8mb are unallocated.
This wouldn’t be caused by a previous GPT format would it?
