Railfan Technology > WD "My Book", a warning

I'm sure many T.O. members archive their camera images to either a Western Digital or Seagate outboard USB type drive.

This is my second disaster involving a WD "My Book".

For a few months, it was taking the poor 4 year old 3TB WD My Book what seemed like an eternity to spin up and get connected with my computer. Upon connecting to the 12V power source, the drive would spin, head positioner would start moving and moving and moving with no mounting of the drive taking place. This would go on for nearly 5 minutes before the drive finally would mount to the computer.

Naturally, I worried that kind of torture would ultimately lead to a crash and take all my photo archives along with it. I decided to open the My Book and remove the drive and hot wire it to the USB port. Seemingly easy, but not really. The physical removal of the drive is easy. Reading the data, well, that was another matter.

I'll leave it to the reader to search how to open the My Book drive and what comes next. You do this at your own peril. You may be able to rescue your data or you may lose it all.

WD makes excellent hard disc drives. But, I'm not so sure of the quality they use in making the interface/power supply board. The first image is a view of the original I/F board on the right and the new style on the left. This board does several things. It takes the 12V and through a switching power supply makes 5V for the drive and internal electronics. The other function is to convert the incoming data stream into some kind of proprietary (hardware) encrypted data which it writes to the drive and subsequently reads and translates back to real world usable data. It's this hardware data encryption that poses the biggest problem.

As the drive was spinning up and trying to mount, a few measurements revealed the 5 volt supply was dipping to around 3 volt intermittently. This is what was keeping the drive from successfully mounting within Windows.

Because the data on the drive is encrypted (regardless of whether or not the user elects to use WD's disk security software), removing the drive and connecting directly to a computer is useless. You see nothing. You'll likely get a Windows message (Mac did too) the drive is unformatted, do you want to format? Yikes!! NO, don't format. Even with Windows 7 disk manager, the drive shows only as an unused partition equivalent to the size of remaining unused space on the drive. In my case, it was 730GB remaining of 2.72TB total usable space.

The next move is a total gamble with a 50/50 chance of recovering the data. Short of sending the drive out to a disk data recovery company and at least $300, I bought another 3TB WD My Book. I checked the WD website and they have refurbished drives for significantly less than new. I was only after the I/F board. I ended up using the new 3TB SATA drive as the new backup drive. This time, it would be under the control of Windows instead of WD's hardware encryption.

The second image shows the initial setup with the original I/F board. The replacement WD 3TB SATA drive is in the drop in USB3 drive holder. This replacement 3TB drive is formatted in standard NTFS and can easily be accessed without the need for WD's interface board. Ultimately, this did work for recovering the data. But, I wanted to have a backup I/F board in case the 5 volt supply acted up during the transfer of data.

Formatting the 3TB drive beyond 2TB (in Win 7) is tricky if all available space is to be used. I'll leave it to the reader to figure that out. Hint: Where's my MacBook?

The transfer of a little under 2TB of data took nearly 12 hours to accomplish.

Hard lesson learned. The new 3TB backup drive is now mounted in a simple outboard USB3 drive enclosure. I doubt I'll ever go the WD My Book route again.

daniel

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Thank you for writing up this warning. It's lame that they would build something like this.
I have never bought an external, but I did buy an enclosure and put in my own "internal" drive. Much more flexible that way.

Ryan Wilkerson
Fair Oaks, CA

I've had this happen to quite a few WD external drives, all USB/Firewire (I generally use Firewire). Since I switched to Seagate, haven't had a problem. However, my two main externals right now are a pair of Seagate 3TB GoFlex drives. Unfortunately, I've recently been hearing about higher than normal failure rates of many 3TB hard drives (the drives themselves) then I found this.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

Interesting reading. Time to replace these with some 4TB drives. Since USB 3.0 became all the rage it's been harder and harder to find enclosures with a Firewire interface so I'll probably recycle these GoFlex units with upgraded SATA drives.

I just had a meltdown with my 3TB drive. They replaced it under warranty. The lady at Seagate told me that when the new one gets here, take the bottom off (it just pulled off) and swap it with my old one. I think that's where the trouble was as I was able to at least recover what I had on it before I sent it back and put the new one to work.

RyanWilkerson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have never bought an external, but I did buy an
> enclosure and put in my own "internal" drive. Much
> more flexible that way.

And here I thought that was what the dang MyBook was!

Hmm....

I have several - at least two for each set of backups.

/Mitch

Mgoldman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> RyanWilkerson Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > I have never bought an external, but I did buy
> an
> > enclosure and put in my own "internal" drive.
> Much
> > more flexible that way.
>
> And here I thought that was what the dang MyBook
> was!
>
> Hmm....
>
> I have several - at least two for each set of
> backups.
>
> /Mitch

Right, I have two WD "powered" and now have two of the newer 1T powered off USB, not like putting slides in a box, it has to be
maintained on a schedule. Then there is the cloud, haven't done yet.

Even with that, as people move through life, interests, time etc my guess is a lot like 80 pct or so will be list thru lifetime,
remember we are only 10-15 years into the digital image age.

Bob

251F Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Because the data on the drive is encrypted
> (regardless of whether or not the user elects to
> use WD's disk security software), removing the
> drive and connecting directly to a computer is
> useless. You see nothing. You'll likely get a
> Windows message (Mac did too) the drive is
> unformatted, do you want to format? Yikes!! NO,
> don't format. Even with Windows 7 disk manager,
> the drive shows only as an unused partition
> equivalent to the size of remaining unused space
> on the drive. In my case, it was 730GB remaining
> of 2.72TB total usable space.
>
>
> daniel

Is the data encrypted, or is the problem really that
the drive is formatted with a linux partition, which
windows will not recognize. I've got a dual 1 TB world
book here, and I run linux. I've often been tempted to
remove one of the drives and install it in a linux box
just to see what would happen. My WB is now over four
years old, so I'm beginning to think that I need to
redo my network storage. I'm thinking that I'll just
buy two quality 1 or 2 TB drives and mount them as a
raid system. The WB is nice, but it's slow to move things
on the network: the processor is anemic and results in
a throttled system.

John.

jkh2cpu Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>
> Is the data encrypted, or is the problem really
> that
> the drive is formatted with a linux partition,
> which
> windows will not recognize.
>
> John.

Good point, maybe it is Linux based. It would be an interesting experiment to try a drive from a My Book on a linux based system.

However, I was of the impression that a OSX/Intel based Mac would recognize a Linux format/partition. Maybe I'm wrong. My MacBook also did not recognize the My Book encrypted format.

daniel

trainjunkie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've recently been hearing about
> higher than normal failure rates of many 3TB hard
> drives (the drives themselves) then I found this.
>
>
> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
>
> Interesting reading.

Indeed and thanks for the link. How the acquisition of HGST by WD will impact this apparently low failure rate is anyone's guess. For the moment, HGST still functions as a subsidiary company of WD due to some problem with Chinese regulators.

I have a second HGST 4TB mass storage drive which I suddenly have a lot more confidence in.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/29/how-will-hgst-integration-impact-western-digital/

daniel