My Book Duo Repeated RAID failure

I have a 2x 4TB My Book Duo which is 2 years old. In that time I have experienced 3 RAID failures, which could only be resolved through a complete RAID rebuild, with the consequent nuisance of having to backup nearly 4TB of data and then copy it back to the My Book Duo once it has been restored. I use Mac OS 13.6.

On all three failures I got a warning that there was a RAID problem, and could see the tell-tale red light flashing slowly on the front of the unit. I was advised to run WD Drive Utilities. This informed that one of my drives had failed. The data was accessible on the other drive.

This happened within a few months of buying the unit, so I doubted WD Red drives would have failed so soon. By removing each of the drives, and booting them individually in the My Book enclosure, I found I could access the date on both drives, so clearly I was being misinformed by WD Utilities that one drive had failed. However the only way to restore the RAID 1 format I had been using was to reset RAID configuration, which erases all the data.

This has happened 3 times in 2 years and has eroded my faith in the My Book Duo as a reliable archive. I imagine the actual problem is some kind of fault or corruption of the raid management firmware, but it is hard to be sure. Has anyone else experienced this? After resetting the RAID configuration my unit is once again registering as ‘healthy’, but I am having to recopy all my data from an alternative back-up onto the My Book Duo. If I have to keep yet another backup because of repeated failures of the RAID system, it defeats the purpose of having it.

I’m sorry to hear about your experience with your My Book Duo. RAID failures can be frustrating and time-consuming, especially when it comes to backing up and restoring data. It’s possible that the problem you’re experiencing is related to a firmware issue, as you suggested, or it could be due to other factors, such as environmental factors (e.g. heat or humidity) or issues with the hard drives themselves.

One thing you could try is contacting Western Digital’s technical support team to see if they can provide any guidance or assistance. They may be able to help you diagnose the issue and offer a solution that doesn’t involve resetting the RAID configuration and losing your data.

In the meantime, you may want to consider keeping additional backups of your important data to mitigate the risk of data loss in the event of another RAID failure. You could use an online backup service, an external hard drive, or even a cloud storage solution like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Overall, it’s important to remember that even with the most reliable hardware and software, data loss can still occur. It’s always a good idea to have a backup strategy in place that includes multiple copies of your data stored in different locations.

You can check the blog on how to recover data from the RAID drive, Moreover, there is an awesome feature that is the drive monitor which can notify the bad sectors in the drive and help you to change the drive on time.
https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/all-in-one-windows-tool-for-raid-server-drive-monitor-photo-video/