Around 2009-2010, I bought a number of WD external drives for video editing and archiving. Back then, the video world was at the tail end of standard definition and we were all trying to figure out high definition.
For the last several years, I’ve been staring at my relatively fast WD My Book Pro II (1TB, RAID 0 attached via firewire 800) and wishing that it was larger. I had relagated it to the task of holding my music library, stock images and footage, and so on. When I’ve needed one of the elements on that drive for a project, I would copy it over to my project drive which was faster, but kinda small. I kept looking at this My Book and wishing that I could make it bigger.
Last night, I wandered across this retired thread and was annoyed. The original poster wanted to know how to replace one of the drives and repeatedly asked the same simple question from WD and got no real reply as to why only the original drive models could be used. I decided to take up arms, fish out a pair of 2T drives I had kicking around, and see what would happen. I was especially interested in this experiment as the only WD internal drive I’ve ever had that failed was a blue edition. For paying project work, I make sure that I keep important data on black drives. At the time, I was thankful that the failed drive was only being used for Time Machine backups.
The hard drives that were originally in this My Book Pro were WD Caviar Blue editions model # WD5000AAKS (500G). Both drives indicate they were manfactured on the same day (May 11, 2007). There are stickers on each drive indicating which is drive A and which is drive B, but I see no reason to believe there is anything other than chance to lead why one would be the first drive.
I figured that there may be some reason why I would only be able to use WD drives in this enclosure so I made sure to stay in the WD family. I grabbed 2 WD Caviar Black edition drives. Unfortunately, I did not have 2 2T drives that were exactly the same model number. Since my goal was to use this in the RAID 1 configuration, I knew that they had to be very close. I did have 2 black 2T drives that had 64M caches, but differented SATA rates. I randomly chose the following configuration:
Drive 1: 2TB - WD2002FAEX (manufactured 3/27/11, 6.0Gb/s SATA)
Drive 2: 2TB - WD2001FASS (manufactured 12/25/10, 3.0Gb/s SATA)
I formatted the 2TB drives for Mac (I’m on a 27" iMac late 2009 model running OSX 10.9.4) on my drive docking station, pulled the old 500G drives out, removed the plastic slide rails, and put in the 2TB drives. I then connected the firewire 800 cable, plugged it in, and…nothing. Didn’t mount and didn’t appear in Disk Utility.
However, having just had a handful of potato chips, my blood sugar was up and ready to keep going.
I opened the MyBook Raid Manager app and there it was, sitting there with a RAID configuration of “unknown” and a capacity of just under 4TB. I selected HFS RAID 1 and the drives started churning. When they finished, the drive mounted as a 2TB drive and started working flawlessly. I now have a 2TB project drive that’s also running RAID 1.
As I was researching this last night, there seemed to be little info on this online so I thought I’d write this up to help people out. I hope it helps you.
