Will the drives work standalone?

Portable Drives My Passport
1

I am considering a WD16TB my book duo desktop raid external hard drive - wdblwe0160jch-nesn.

Will the drives work standalone. For example: Say in an emergency could I remove one of the raid-1 drives insert into a USB 3.0 dock and use that to recover lost data?
Please advise.

2

This would depend on a number of factors, but I wouldn’t recommend it. ALWAYS keep a second copy of all vital data.

3

Scott, sorry apparently I was not clear. Will the drives work standalone outside of the WD enclosure?

[This would depend on a number of factors,]
Was going to use 5-8TB raid-1 pair. can I recover from one drive removed and inserted into a generic USB dock.
Thx in advance. H Jones

4

Yes - I did understand what you are saying. You could use them independently, but in most cases you’d need to format them (erase everything) for them to be recognized. The only exception would be if you put them into a JBOD instead of a RAID - in these cases you’d be able to see the data for what was saved on that volume in some application - but again, this is not supported by WD and not recommended.

5

I was looking to use RAID-1 discs as an emergency recovery. For example if the WD wdblwe0160jch-nesn hardware died. I might be able to recover data from one of the raid-1 pair.

Are you aware of any RAID-1 drive, other than ICY-DOCK that offer this standalone recovery work-around?

Thx, H Jones

6

No - that goes against the purpose of RAID (and I’d personally be very hesitant against using a product that is advertising that kind of functionality without doing a lot of research)

RAID is not a backup - it’s redundancy. If a drive fails, you replace it and the RAID rebuilds. A backup on the other hand is a second copy of the data you can restore from.

7

SIr;

What I need to know is if one of the raid pair physical hard drive will work standalone on a generic USB interface on a WIN-10 box.
Is the WD RAID-1 drive format proprietary or something generic that can be used last-ditch recovering data in case of a WD hardware failure?

Thank you, H Jones