Is the My Book Duo compatible with Ubuntu Linux?

External Drives My Book Duo
1

Hello,

I’m looking to buy the My Book Duo (WDBLWE0040JCH-NESN) for an external backup drive. However, Ubuntu Linux is my primary OS. My questions are:

  1. Will I be able to configure the drive to use RAID-1 from within Ubuntu, or would I need to do the initial configuration on a Windows machine?

  2. After it’s configured, will the RAID-1 array be usable from within Ubuntu?

Have googled all over and can’t come up with answers. Don’t want to make the purchase until I’m certain.

Thanks!

2

Hello,

I have not tried this, but lets see if another user can share some information or tips on this matter.

3

Wd My Book Duo in RAID 1 mode (2*4TB) works fine for me. I changed mode to RAID1 on Windows driven PC, formatted it in ext4 mode with Paragon Hard disk Manager on same PC, than attached to my home server, driven by Ubuntu 14.04 (Intense PC: IPC2 ) to USB3 port. After usual operations (sudo blkid to determine UID and editing /etc/fstab it works fine for me. Important: when I opened drive in Paragon Disk Manager after switching to RAID1 mode, there were 2 partitions: one small hidden NTFS formatted partition (it contains WD soft) and one large NTFS formatted partition. I destroyed both (on my mind this is must when you are intend to use drive with Linux) and created one partition on all drive volume, after this I formatted it to ext4.
One issue: after I connected drive to Linux machine, blue LED’s are always off. But drive itself works perfectly.

4

I have had one running on debian for. A few years.
But i had to set it up as raid1 on Windows.

After that linux recognised it as a usb drive with hardware raid.
So any repairs would have to be run using windows.

What i am looking for is native Linux utilities for the drive.