I have a 12TB My Book duo configured as a RAID 1. Bought the drive in 2015 and have had no problems with it until now. In Dec of 17 one of the hard drives failed. I was able to replace the drive and the unit rebuilt my RAID 1 array and all data was good. I was happy. 1 month later in Jan of 18 I lost the second drive. Repeated the process as before and was back up and running. Since the replacement of the second drive I have noticed the computer (Windows 7) at times does not see the drive and if you use the WD drive utility it will actually show a unformatted drive with 0 data. I have over 4 TB of data on this drive so you can imagine my terror thinking I lost the info. Interesting enough the drive shows up under disc mgmt. as an unallocated drive. I have found that by cycling power on the drive several times it will finally show up and function normally. I just lost the 1st replacement drive yesterday and am in the process of replacing it. By the way after loosing 2 drives in a month I installed temp fan sensors on the drive and added some force air cooling just in case. Temp never exceeds 45C on the internal enclosure. Has anyone experienced this? I am now thinking of switching to a different drive. My confidence in this unit is going down.
3/15/2018. Update: Since my last post I decided to transfer the data on the drive to a new drive(Seagate) while it was up, before I attempted to replace the #1 drive showing failure. This attempt failed. I was unable to access the data on the My book Duo unit even though it was showing up in drive mgmt. I had no choice but to recycle power to the unit. Since then the drive shows up on the WD software as good and on Disk Mgmt. as unformatted. I have contacted WD tech support and have no reply as of yet. Looks like I will be checking out their data recover services. However if it is as poor as the technical service response I have little hope of recovering the data. I spent over 500.00 for this unit plus another 400.00 for 2 replacement drives since 2015. Even if I get this data back I have lost confidence in the WD units. I believe I will forget about the RAID setup and just purchase multiple drives to back up my data. Lessoned learned: always back up your data on multiple drives. Hope this post will prevent others from trusting your RAID 1 as data backup.
