I have three different MyBook Duo enclosures and have updated the drives multiple times. Last night, one of the drives ejected itself and now it refuses to mount. I have tried it on both my Mac Mini and my MacBook Pro with no luck. Nothing in Disk Utility at all. And, as bad luck would have it, it failed in the middle of its first backup to another newly formatted RAID so I only have half of the data backed up. If I had a complete backup, this would be a non-issue. But, I do not.
My big question is: Can I pull the hard drives from this enclosure and put them into one of my other enclosures without losing the data on the drives?
It is two Caviar Green 4Tb drives. All the drives in all the enclosures are formatted the same to RAID 0 and there is no encryption that I am aware of or anything like that. It was formatted using Disk Utility. It would be a like for like swap. The drives would go into the identical slots in the other enclosure.
Or, would pulling the drives make the drives lose their RAID connection? Are the drives ‘tied’ to this particular enclosure? I do not believe that the drives are bad as I received no indications or warnings of a potential drive failure.
Thank you for your prompt reply. After reading this, it would seem that I can move the hard drives from the non-functioning enclosure to one of the other ones. Am I reading this correctly?
**Will I lose my data if the hardware encryption is not used and the enclosure needs to be replaced?**
The encryption is always turned on and cannot be configured. The data is not lost. If the My Book Duo enclosure fails, replace the My Book Duo enclosure. Make sure that the My Book Duo firmware is the most recent, then move the HDDs in the replacement enclosure of the My Book Duo. The data should be available without any other configuration.
**Will I lose my data if the hardware encryption is used and the enclosure needs to be replaced?**
The data is not lost. If the My Book Duo enclosure fails, replace the My Book Duo enclosure. Make sure that the My Book Duo firmware is the most recent, then move the HDDs in the replacement enclosure of the My Book Duo. The data should be available without any other configuration.
My only concern is the firmware update. If the defective enclosure has one firmware and the other one a different firmware, could that cause problems?
Again, thank you very much for your reply. It is most appreciated.
I just purchased a MyBook Duo 16TB to use as an 8TB mirrored drive with RAID 1. I am interested to know whether you determined whether in the event of enclosure failure your drives could be moved to a new WD MyBook Duo enclosure with the data intact. I’m reading a lot about hardware encryption making the drives unrecoverable (without great expense) in the event of an enclosure failure, and it’s making me nervous about my purchase.
Were you able to swap your drives into a different MyBook Duo enclosure and recover your data? Was the installed firmware an obstacle? Any concerns with MyBook Duo enclosures built for different size drives utilizing differing power supplies? I like the idea that I can replace one drive at a time if I experience a drive failure. Just want to make sure that in the unlikely event of an enclosure failure, I won’t have lost everything, or incurred a huge amount of hassle.
