WD MyBookStudio ii: dead housing? swapping internal drives...?

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

Hi there,

I have a 2TB WD my book studio ii from 2012 and a 4TB WD my book studio ii from 2013.

The 2TB drive still works and will mount on my MacBook Air.
The 4 TB drive still powers on and spins up, but will not mount and does not even show up in Disk Utility.

The 2TB drive works whether connected directly to the laptop or daisy chained via the 4 TB drive.
The 4 TB drive powers on and spins on whether attached directly or daisy chained via the 2 TB drive, but never mounts.

2 questions:

  1. any guesses as to why the 4TB drive doesnt mount etc?
  2. can i take the two 2 TB hard drives out of the 4TB unit and put them into the (originally) 2 TB housing-- ie will they work? Will I break anything?

Thank you for your help!

–df

2

Hello,

Have you tried formatting the drive? Make sure the drive is plugged in directly into a wall outlet to avoid any power issues.

I dont think taking the two internal drives out of the enclosure and into the 2 TB enclosure will help.

If you need to recover the data on that drive i recommend contacting a data recovery company or maybe trying a data recovery software.

3

Dear Hamlet,

Thanks for your reply.

I did not yet try to reformat the drive, because (if possible), I’d like to see what data is on the drive first.

I am still wondering if the problem is just corrupt files or whether the problem is the housing.

Today I managed to install (supposedly) new drivers and the wd raid manager. the 4tb drive now mounts, the wd manager says all okay (all green lights), but the drive is so slow that it is impossible to browse any files in a useful way.

I’d appreciate any thoughts anyone might have, including about whether the files on the drive or corrupted or whether it is the housing.

Thanks and regards,

df