I read here on the forum that the reason the bigger Easystore and MyBook drives work with systems that don’t normally support huge HDs is some fancy translation magic. So far so good. I have one of each working fine with an older box (4TB and 6TB, tho the PC itself only supports 2TB max). Just plugged them in and they work and are seen correctly.
BUT – what if the enclosure dies, but the HD is still good? how do I recover my data? can I just extract the HD and put it in a PC that supports these huge HDs? or do I need to find a donor enclosure of the same type? People with backup paranoia want to know!
WD Easy store and My book are not user serviceable devices. If your enclosure fails then you would need to contact third party data recovery companies to get the data recovered from the drives.
How is a backup drive useful if the data requires that kind of extremely expensive hoop-jumping to recover? It’s only useful if the drive can be extracted and hooked to a regular PC in the event the ENCLOSURE fails but the HD is still working.
I won’t be buying any more of them, and they are now demoted to temporary storage. Wasted money, since now I’ll have to replace them with a standard enclosure and bare drives that CAN be hooked to the PC if the enclosure fails (in my experience very likely to fail before the HD does).
[I had planned to shift all my large storage to these units. So much for that idea.]
