Hi all, I’m trying to carry out some checks on x4 WD Red drives I have. I’ve put them into an external enclosure but WD Drive Utility can’t see them, even though my Mac OS can, am I doing something wrong here?
Yeah, that’s normal. WD Drive Utilities often won’t detect bare internal WD Red drives when they’re connected through a random USB enclosure/dock. macOS can see the drive fine, but the WD tool usually only works with supported WD external enclosures (and some USB bridge chips block the low-level commands it needs).
What to do instead:
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Check SMART health with DriveDx (Mac) or smartmontools
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Or plug the drives into a SATA port inside a PC/NAS for full testing
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If you want WD’s own diagnostics, use Data Lifeguard on a Windows PC with direct SATA (USB often won’t work)
So you’re not doing anything wrong — it’s just the enclosure/USB bridge + WD utility limitation.
I’m having trouble getting WD Drive Utility to recognize my WD Red drives. They show up fine in macOS, but the utility can’t detect them. Not sure if it’s a settings issue or just a compatibility problem with the external enclosure.
I’m trying to use WD Drive utilities to run some diagnostics on a potentially problematic WD Red drive. However, it is not being picked up by the utility. It is also not picking up my WD Black drive I have installed either. Both drives are connected internally via a SATA connection directly to my MB. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software and it still fails to pick either of them up. I have also noticed that the WD Drive Manager service cannot seem to shut down or restart. When uninstalling, I had to set the service to disabled and then uninstall the software as the uninstaller was not able to shut the service down on its own. I downloaded the software from the WD website so it is the latest version available.
