Thunderbolt Duo using RAID 1 - If one drive fails, can I still access the other good drive?

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi

I’ve been using my 6TB WD TB Duo drive for a few years now with no problems.
I moved the computer to another room and one of the drives decided not to work. Then, after a few hours and playing around with it, it stated up ok.
It rebuilt itself and is working fine.
My question is: If this drive did fail for real, can the other drive still be accessed? I would need to get the data off it as that’s the whole reason for running RAID 1 after all.

Cheers

Daveyace (NZ)

2

I’m not 100% sure with this specific drive (I don’t have one personally and it’s been a long time since I’ve used one in the office), but in general yes a mirrored drive can be accessed in a ‘degraded’ mode. You could then put in another (100% identical) drive and it would rebuild.

Please keep in mind that if the ENCLOSURE fails you could lose both drives at once and we don’t recommend using RAID as a backup system. Drive redundancy is a wonderful thing but life has a way of throwing curve balls at you and anything that’s important should always be kept on (at least) two separate drives.

This article may provide more helpful information:

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=8644&s=

3

Hi Great_Scott

Thanks for your reply. I can’t seem to access just one drive when the other has been removed; however, reading your second point has made me rethink my process. I hadn’t taken a failure of the enclosure into consideration. I’ve now turned them both into JBOD, and copy the data across manually. This way I can still access the data if the worse happens.

Cheers

Daveyace

4

What happens if an electrical surge causes both drives to fail or it burns up in a house fire?

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I hear you. Have a additional HDD stored elsewhere. Good idea!