I have an iMac running 10.6.8 and a My Book Studio Edition II which is completely devoted to Time Machine. The conneciton is the FW 800 cable that came with the drive. There are no other FW devices connected. The drive is configured for RAID 1. WD RAID Manager says everything is healthy. There’s a single partition, HFS+ (Journaled).
Everything runs fine for several days on end, then I notice that the drive has quietly gone offline without warning and Time Machine backups are not occurring. If I unplug and reconnect the FW cable, it’s fine for several more days. There are never any “improperly disconnected” warnings.
Disk Utility’s “Verify” hasn’t turned up any problems, and I have not found any smoking gun in the system logs.
Sometimes macs will force drives to go to sleep and then not always wake them up properly. There’s a couple of things you could try in order to see if that’s it.
disable power saving, except for your monitor, and see if the drive stays online.
Before I left work Friday, I unchecked “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.” Here it is Monday morning and the drive is online, and time machine has been operating. If this goes on a few more days, I will declare that the solution.
Is I stated above, I unchecked "Put hard disk(s) to sleep when possible.) That was almost six days ago and the problem has not recurred since then.
I will note another unique event that did happen in that time, though. Halfway through that six day period, I got a popup warning saying RAID is bad, open WD RAID Manager and call customer support. I opened WD RAID Manager. It said the RAID was bad, then soon changed the status to “Healthy” with no action by me.
you may want to check those disks. if the raid is degrading, it may cause the drive to drop offline, also. could be a smart issue. or bad sectors causing sporadic error checking. or issues with the controller itself.
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I’d make sure that I have all my data in another location as well.
Check the disks how? I can’t find any utility that does more than an fsck. I did the full file system check from Disk Utility and it was fine. System Profiler says SMART is not supported.
Check the disks how? I can’t find any utility that does more than an fsck. I did the full file system check from Disk Utility and it was fine. System Profiler says SMART is not supported.
Take one drive at the time off the MBSII, then test the drive with WD’s DLG but you’ll need Windows for that, then test the other one.
I bought a product that is made and marketed for use with Mac OS X. I don’t even own a copy of windows, nor want one. I’m not going to buy windows and set up dual boot in order to perform a function that the vendor should have provided in the environment they sold into!
I’m satisfied with answer to the offline problem that, yes, I already clicked on all the jazzy buttons for. But for the new symptom, an answer that involves “Buy Windows” is a non-starter.
Still, thanks for the info that WD is not truly serving the Mac-using market. That will help me make future decisions.
