I have a new 8 TB My Book Duo and am configuring it to RAID1. It has been running for over 12 hours. The status light is slowly blinking white (standby) and the WD Drive Utilities status says it’s configuring, with the moving green bar and a warning not to close the window. But there’s no progress indicator so I can’t tell if it’s really working or stuck.
The user guide is pretty useless - it doesn’t say how long to expect (or even warn that it will take a long time) and it says I should see a fast flashing white or steady red when rebuilding but doesn’t say what to expect from the light when configuring to RAID1.
Do I just wait? How long? It sure seems like the configuration time should be predictable as it doesn’t need to copy or preserve data, which can change the time for a rebuild.
I opened a support case on this but after waiting for an answer for a few hours I found the phone number and called. Long story short, the configuration had completed, even though the WD Drive Utilities still said it hadn’t. The agent took me through the steps to get it working. She was very helpful and the problem was resolved.
I still don’t know how long the RAID 1 configuration actually took. A few minutes? A couple of hours? All I know is that it was less than the 16 hours I waited before I called. So my suggestion to anyone who has the same problem is to call them after a couple of hours of waiting for the configuration to complete.
Lesson for WD: You could probably save quite a bit of money in human support costs by doing a better job on your user guide. I’m guessing that a tech writer is going to be cheaper than handling hundreds of calls, and the frustration of hundreds of customers, that could have been easily resolved by better documentation.
