My Book Premium II - Initialize new drives

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

I replaced my 2 500GB drives with 2 2TB drives. (Tech support said I could do this.)

I formatted both drives (Plugged SATA directly the computer) with 1 partition, drive letter Z, Label ‘My Book’ (Tech support said to do this.)

My Book RAID Manager shows Capacity 0.00GB, RAID 0 Mode, Status: Bad

I’ve tried USB and Firewire.

I told RAID manager to change to RAID 1. It failed twice, then worked. Shows up now as

Capacity 0.00GB, RAID 1 mode, Status Bad

When I click ‘next’ in RAID manager it says “Bad Device. Your device failed to operate”, which is not helpful, of course.

If I remove one drive, the message changes to “The slot A contains no hard disk” (or Slot B or slot A+B) so it does see the drives.

Computer Management/Drive management can’t see the drives when they’re in the external case, but can see them when directly connected SATA.

Is there a trick to this? Before replacing the drives, I was getting a high number of bad tracks reported, which is why I replaced the drives, but it was working.

2

The controller might not support drives with that capacity. In situations like that is recommended to replace with similar drives (model and capacity). 

3

Thanks. It’s a shame that (1) tech support didn’t know this limitation, and (2) they put such an artifical limit in at all. I’m going to put the 2T drives in my Buffalo RAID, steal two 500G drives to make the My Book useful, then use the original 2 1T drives from the Buffalo to replace the 500G drives I stole from the computers. Everyone will be happy.

4

I know is kind of a bummer, although it has something to do with this drive particularly. Newer Dual drives support bigger capacity units.