Last year I was looking at options for adding storage to my Mac Pro that I use as a media center, Jenkins server, DVR, and security camera monitoring. The Mac Pro has a 1 TB SSD but storage is eaten up very quickly with everything running on it. I wanted at least 8 TB of usable storage and while I could use a RAID, I was more interested in configuring drives as JBOD (just a bunch of disks).
I decided to get the WD 8TB My Book Duo
The setup worked fine for about a year and then I started noticing that sometimes I’d see error messages on my Mac Pro about the volumes unmounting. I tried plugging the case into a different USB port, but still saw these issues at times. Things started getting worse and I decided to see if the actual drives or the case was failing. I took the drives out of the case and put them in a Thunderbolt dual bay drive dock. This, of course, caused me to lose all my data because I didn’t have the special WD magic sauce on the dock. It appeared that one drive was fine and the other drive was on its way out. I used the one drive and a second 2 TB drive in the dock for a few weeks and didn’t have any of the problems I saw before.
In order to get warranty service on the Duo, I had to send it all back. Since I didn’t know the state of the data on the drives I wanted to do a secure erase on the drives. I individually did a secure erase on the drives which worked fine negating my previous analysis that one of the drives was bad. I put the drives back in the case, reconfigured them then did a drive check using the WD utilities. The drive check failed which indicated to me that the case and not the drives were bad as I had just done a full secure erase which writes zeros to the drive.
The drives and case are now on their way back to Western Digital for warranty repair/replacement. While I don’t know if I had bad luck with this, I’ve moved on to a different case which doesn’t add magic sauce to the drives. Definitely a much more expensive solution than the MyBook Duo, but I trust it a lot more than I do the WD case.
Pros
- Reasonable price.
- Easy to setup.
- 3 year warranty.
Cons
- Crappy WD software to configure.
- JBOD configuration doesn’t let you remove a drive and use it in another mechanism.
- Failed after 1.5 years.
Summary
If you’re looking to add storage to a machine, I’d steer away from this case. In addition, Toshiba drives have been rated better for long term quality and in this case where the drives are running 24/7, spending some extra money on better drives will give me a little peace of mind. If the case simply allowed the drives to show up separately and not add the WD magic, I might have just chalked this up to a drive failure and given it a second chance. However, since all my data is locked into this case, I can’t recommend it. Once my case and drives come back from warranty service, I’m not sure what I should do with it. Any ideas?
ebay!
While that is a good suggestion, Mark, I’ve had pretty mediocre luck selling on eBay. I’ve gotten screwed on a number of transactions with no recourse. I’ll consider it, however.
what do you use or recommend instead on WD Duo ? Also, is it true that these cases have 2 WD Red drives if this is the case I’m surprised that they failed on you.
Thanks
Hi Sam,
I’m now using an Akitio Thunder2 Quad. What I dislike about it is that in the event of a power failure, it won’t startup on its own again without the power button being pressed. I have the drive configured as JBOD and that works well; I have different drives dedicated to different functions on my server.