MBP 1,1-10,2 Data Recovery from a Dying HDD?

[TheShortTimer]

Hey all,

An 8TB HDD (split into multiple partitions) that's less than a year old appears to be dying. Typically only a few days ago it was fine but as of this morning it increasingly fails to mount in Finder and Disk Utility's First Aid advised me to back up whatever I can. As a test, even a document file failed to copy over from the HDD. Just Great.

In the past during these situations I've used DDRescue in a DOS CLI environment on a PC and just let it run for days till everything was rescued but I fear it might be too late for even that if the HDD is increasingly failing to mount in macOS.

Any suggestions?

 

[Grumpus]

ddrescue may be your best bet, but have you tried a different drive cable and/or USB port?

 

[eyoungren]

Hey all,

An 8TB HDD (split into multiple partitions) that's less than a year old appears to be dying. Typically only a few days ago it was fine but as of this morning it increasingly fails to mount in Finder and Disk Utility's First Aid advised me to back up whatever I can. As a test, even a document file failed to copy over from the HDD. Just Great.

In the past during these situations I've used DDRescue in a DOS CLI environment on a PC and just let it run for days till everything was rescued but I fear it might be too late for even that if the HDD is increasingly failing to mount in macOS.

Any suggestions?

I've used Data Rescue in the past. Nothing serious, but I know the app works.

Prosoft Engineering, Inc.

Prosoft Engineering Inc, offers software to undelete your important files, detect malware, monitor your computer, and create backups.

www.prosofteng.com

Above link is to Data Rescue 6, but you may need an earlier version.

Note sure if your data is worth $79 to you though.

 

[TheShortTimer]

ddrescue may be your best bet...

Thanks - this was my conclusion too.

After trying and failing to get an early version of DDRescueGUI that I managed to locate (the author has pulled the freeware versions and made it payware, even for the PPC version) to recognise that the partitions have been unmounted, I switched to ordinary ddrescue, pasted the drive paths and it's working.

At the time of writing its rescued almost 8GB of 700GB - so it will likely have several days - perhaps even a week ahead but it's working and fingers crossed that the drive holds up for that long. Speaking of which:

...but have you tried a different drive cable and/or USB port?

Yes and a different enclosure too. Eventually I got it to at least mount by using the standard USB 2.0. port on my 2011 MBP instead of the 3.0. one on my Thunderbolt dock. Here's what DriveDx reported (h/t to @weckart for that recommendation):

Failed after three months and Disk Utility still reports the drive as "verified."

I'll have to contact Seagate and hopefully sort out an RMA.

I've used Data Rescue in the past. Nothing serious, but I know the app works.

Prosoft Engineering, Inc.

Prosoft Engineering Inc, offers software to undelete your important files, detect malware, monitor your computer, and create backups.

www.prosofteng.com

Above link is to Data Rescue 6, but you may need an earlier version.

Note sure if your data is worth $79 to you though.

Thanks, I tried Data Rescue 3 earlier but got stuck at Stage 3 when it refused to proceed with the cloning because the target drive is a workspace - and still wouldn't go ahead when a different partition on that target drive was selected and the program insisted that it too is a workspace.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks, I tried Data Rescue 3 earlier but got stuck at Stage 3 when it refused to proceed with the cloning because the target drive is a workspace - and still wouldn't go ahead when a different partition on that target drive was selected and the program insisted that it too is a workspace.

You might look up DiskWarrior. It can repair a lot and it'll mark bad blocks. Might give you some time before the drive fully fails. And alternatively, it can function as data recovery.

 

[f54da]

DiskWarrior probably won't help for physically failing disks. ddrescue seems like best option.

 

[TheShortTimer]

DiskWarrior probably won't help for physically failing disks. ddrescue seems like best option.

It seems that ddrescue requires a particular hardware and software environment to operate properly. I've been attempting to rescue the data via external USB enclosures and there's been all kinds of issues, including the destination USB drive apparently failing to store any data. I've tried it under High Sierra on my 2011 MBP, with Ventura on my 2012 13" MBP and a Live CD session of System Rescue on the same machine but it doesn't work properly or consistently.

From what I've read, ddrescue is more effective when it can access drives via SATA rather than USB, so I've purchased a dirt-cheap i7 PC from eBay (£39! GBP) and when it arrives, I'll install System Rescue onto its SSD instead of running it from a live session, connect the target and destination HDDs via SATA and then fingers crossed, I'll prevail.

 

[f54da]

Yeah that seems like a good option, esp. since ddrescue would likely requiring issuing lower-level ATA commands (e.g. read ignoring ecc) and would probably work best in a linux env that allows this.

 

[ojfd]

I have a 500GB Crucial SSD that failed big time taking some of my very valuable data with it. I suspect that one of the memory chips is either bad or there is problem with power supply for it. Or maybe a cold solder.

Anyway, I was able to rescue what was readable off of that drive with the help of DiskWarrior. I also tried DataRescue. It rescued more files than DiskWarrior, but those extra files had bad data or were corrupt.
The good thing about the DiskWarrior is that it tries to reconstruct directories without touching anything on the drive. The same could not be said about Apple's Disk Utility. DiskWarrior also writes a log which lists files that it couldn't recover.

There is also this tool that I use for a lot of other tasks that apparently has the ability to read across the bad blocks. Give it a try.

iBored

apps.tempel.org

And, there's another aspect of rescueing data - every time system mounts or tries to mount the disk, it writes some data to it. This is not good, because with damaged disks one can easily overwrite a valid data. Therefore I would also recommend to use this forensic tool to prevent mounting of the disks:

GitHub - aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator: A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures.

A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures. - aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator

github.com

Hope this helps.

 

[eyoungren]

I have a 500GB Crucial SSD that failed big time taking some of my very valuable data with it. I suspect that one of the memory chips is either bad or there is problem with power supply for it. Or maybe a cold solder.

Anyway, I was able to rescue what was readable off of that drive with the help of DiskWarrior. I also tried DataRescue. It rescued more files than DiskWarrior, but those extra files had bad data or were corrupt.
The good thing about the DiskWarrior is that it tries to reconstruct directories without touching anything on the drive. The same could not be said about Apple's Disk Utility. DiskWarrior also writes a log which lists files that it couldn't recover.

There is also this tool that I use for a lot of other tasks that apparently has the ability to read across the bad blocks. Give it a try.

iBored

apps.tempel.org

And, there's another aspect of rescueing data - every time system mounts or tries to mount the disk, it writes some data to it. This is not good, because with damaged disks one can easily overwrite a valid data. Therefore I would also recommend to use this forensic tool to prevent mounting of the disks:

GitHub - aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator: A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures.

A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures. - aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator

github.com

Hope this helps.

I once had a laptop drive with no backup, and the drive started to fail. At the time I knew literally nothing, but I was able to leverage my boss's license of DiskWarrior to recover the data. Alsoft had me send the laptop drive and a spare drive in an enclosure to Texas. They paid for all the shipping and charged nothing for the recovery. I got everything back.

Since then, I've been constant about backups at work and at home. So far, I have not really needed them, but I won't be stuck in that spot again where the only copy of my data is on a failing drive. I've got a daily backup on my NAS and if the NAS fails, I've got at most, a week old copy on Dropbox. And Dropbox counts as an 'offsite' backup.

It only takes being (almost) burned once…

 

[TheShortTimer]

Yeah that seems like a good option, esp. since ddrescue would likely requiring issuing lower-level ATA commands (e.g. read ignoring ecc) and would probably work best in a linux env that allows this.

You are correct. The consensus is that USB hinders the effectiveness of ddrescue, so too does running it in other environments than Linux and this has been confirmed by my experiences. I've been running ddrescue under System Rescue on the i7 PC for over 24 hours with both drives connected to the computer via SATA and the results have been markedly better.

The data is now actually being recovered, there's a far lower number of read errors, an absence of fatal errors and I have an estimation of the remaining time for recovery.

This is the direction that I should've taken from the beginning but you live and learn.

I have a 500GB Crucial SSD that failed big time taking some of my very valuable data with it. I suspect that one of the memory chips is either bad or there is problem with power supply for it. Or maybe a cold solder.

Anyway, I was able to rescue what was readable off of that drive with the help of DiskWarrior. I also tried DataRescue. It rescued more files than DiskWarrior, but those extra files had bad data or were corrupt.
The good thing about the DiskWarrior is that it tries to reconstruct directories without touching anything on the drive. The same could not be said about Apple's Disk Utility. DiskWarrior also writes a log which lists files that it couldn't recover.

There is also this tool that I use for a lot of other tasks that apparently has the ability to read across the bad blocks. Give it a try.

iBored

apps.tempel.org

And, there's another aspect of rescueing data - every time system mounts or tries to mount the disk, it writes some data to it. This is not good, because with damaged disks one can easily overwrite a valid data. Therefore I would also recommend to use this forensic tool to prevent mounting of the disks:

GitHub - aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator: A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures.

A Mac OS X forensic utility which manages file system mounting in support of forensic procedures. - aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator

github.com

Hope this helps.

Thanks for these recommendations but ddrescue operating outside of macOS (or Windows for that matter!) is the better choice for reasons outlined in this post and others. For example, a Linux data recovery distro such as System Rescue automatically unmounts drives anyway. My MacBooks are unsuited for this task due to their USB ports and my Mac Pro requires attention - hence me opting for a cheapo dedicated PC to see this mission through.

I once had a laptop drive with no backup, and the drive started to fail. At the time I knew literally nothing, but I was able to leverage my boss's license of DiskWarrior to recover the data. Alsoft had me send the laptop drive and a spare drive in an enclosure to Texas. They paid for all the shipping and charged nothing for the recovery. I got everything back.

Since then, I've been constant about backups at work and at home. So far, I have not really needed them, but I won't be stuck in that spot again where the only copy of my data is on a failing drive. I've got a daily backup on my NAS and if the NAS fails, I've got at most, a week old copy on Dropbox. And Dropbox counts as an 'offsite' backup.

It only takes being (almost) burned once…

I was caught totally off-guard here due to the drive only being a few months old (but on reflection there were warning signs from the beginning) and that lulled me into a false sense of security and I really should've known better after episodes where SSDs and HDDs were DOA or the purportedly brand new 15" 2012 MBP that suffered a GPU failure within less than an hour of its unboxing.

Again, you live and learn and there's a lesson learned here about being pro-active. I'll have to buy a stash of drives from a stockist who offers a long-term replacement warranty (or maybe purchase them from the manufacturer) and clone everything of importance. My efforts on this front have been half-hearted and that will need to change.

If people have recommendations or suggestions on hardware that could automate this process, please share.

 

[f54da]

If you have space to keep a set of drives permanently hooked up and your target data of interest changes frequently enough, some sort of raid thing might be easier than manually maintaining backups across multiple disks. I've heard using zfs drivers on osx and creating a zfs pool for n+1 redundancy is possible.

 

[eyoungren]

I was caught totally off-guard here due to the drive only being a few months old (but on reflection there were warning signs from the beginning) and that lulled me into a false sense of security and I really should've known better after episodes where SSDs and HDDs were DOA or the purportedly brand new 15" 2012 MBP that suffered a GPU failure within less than an hour of its unboxing.

Again, you live and learn and there's a lesson learned here about being pro-active. I'll have to buy a stash of drives from a stockist who offers a long-term replacement warranty (or maybe purchase them from the manufacturer) and clone everything of importance. My efforts on this front have been half-hearted and that will need to change.

If people have recommendations or suggestions on hardware that could automate this process, please share.

Totally understand being caught off guard. I just freaked out way back in 2007 or so when this happened to me. I'm prone to catastrophism (which is imagining the worst possible thing that could ever happen, even if reality says it's improbable) and so having to explain to my boss (at that time) how it is that we didn't get the newspapers out (that people had subscriptions to) because I did not maintain a backup and losing my own data on top of it was enough to motivate me.

Also, due to the nature of how I tend to push my systems to their hardware limits, I have a real hesitation of attempting OS upgrades or drive clones without having a backup. Heck, as you know, I don't even like rebooting!

There's that pit in your stomach feeling when you've lost everything or seen no way out of a predicament and there is no help coming that I want to avoid feeling. It's why I spread all my data out into several places and have zero hangups in having more than one copy of the same thing.

As to suggestions, I think I've related what I do before. All my Macs (and PCs) back up to the NAS, which is a 6TB networked RAID. Once a day. Weekly, they backup to the Dropbox folder on my MacPro. I use sparse drive images because those are easy to move around. sparse bundles are just a nightmare to move, especially on drives connected via SMB. Carbon Copy Cloner is what I use because I can schedule backups.

Further, I use CCC to also backup other important stuff on my network to my NAS. For instance, my music library and media library are backed up to the NAS. Those are not on my main drives, but on my network. Periodically I'll drop those drive images into Dropbox manually.

I end up paying Dropbox about $28 a month for 4.1TB of storage. But my data is safe off-site.

 

[ojfd]

Totally understand being caught off guard. I just freaked out way back in 2007 or so when this happened to me. I'm prone to catastrophism (which is imagining the worst possible thing that could ever happen, even if reality says it's improbable) and so having to explain to my boss (at that time) how it is that we didn't get the newspapers out (that people had subscriptions to) because I did not maintain a backup and losing my own data on top of it was enough to motivate me.

Ouch! I can feel your pain.
To continue with horror stories..
In my case it was my first and just under 1 year old SSD by Crucial. I've lost important psd files of our work that we were planning to print on high-end Epson photo printer and doing an exhibition. I've managed to get the flattened tiffs + pdfs back from the magazine, but those were already converted (by me) to 8 bits and smallish CMYK color space.
Since that accident, I've blacklisted anything by Crucial and keep 4 backups of important stuff + 2 backups of everything else. CCC is the main tool. No TimeMachine.

@TheShortTimer - I'm glad it's going well for you. Please do share the results. I might try the Linux route on my SSD too some day, although I have absolutely zero experience with that OS.

 

[TheShortTimer]

If you have space to keep a set of drives permanently hooked up and your target data of interest changes frequently enough, some sort of raid thing might be easier than manually maintaining backups across multiple disks. I've heard using zfs drivers on osx and creating a zfs pool for n+1 redundancy is possible.

As to suggestions, I think I've related what I do before. All my Macs (and PCs) back up to the NAS, which is a 6TB networked RAID. Once a day. Weekly, they backup to the Dropbox folder on my MacPro. I use sparse drive images because those are easy to move around. sparse bundles are just a nightmare to move, especially on drives connected via SMB. Carbon Copy Cloner is what I use because I can schedule backups.

Further, I use CCC to also backup other important stuff on my network to my NAS. For instance, my music library and media library are backed up to the NAS. Those are not on my main drives, but on my network. Periodically I'll drop those drive images into Dropbox manually.

I end up paying Dropbox about $28 a month for 4.1TB of storage. But my data is safe off-site.

Thanks for the replies, I'll look into a RAID/NAS setup.

I've blacklisted anything by Crucial and keep 4 backups of important stuff + 2 backups of everything else. CCC is the main tool. No TimeMachine.

Beware of Kingston also. They refused to honour the alleged lifetime warranty on a couple of SD cards that cost a pittance and would've been inconsequential for them to replace, by employing shameless sophistry that was shocking - even by bean counter standards. It would've been more understandable if they'd sought to renege their obligations if it involved an expensive item but behaving like that over a couple of SD cards? Disgusting.

@TheShortTimer - I'm glad it's going well for you. Please do share the results.

Deal.

I might try the Linux route on my SSD too some day, although I have absolutely zero experience with that OS.

You really don't need experience with Linux - that's the beauty of it all.

As long as you can burn a CD/DVD or write a bootable USB device, you're all set. I previously rescued data on a USB HDD with bad sectors using a PC that booted a Live CD distro called Recovery is Possible/RIPLinuX and it loaded dd_rescue, the forerunner of ddrescue into a pure DOS environment without a GUI.

All you need to know are the device paths for the target and destination drives, whether you want to create an image or a clone and the argument syntax for particular recovery methods. If you can install macOS then you can use ddrescue under Linux. I can provide a guide of some sort when you're ready to test the waters.

 

[ojfd]

I can provide a guide of some sort when you're ready to test the waters.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

 

[eyoungren]

Ouch! I can feel your pain.
To continue with horror stories..
In my case it was my first and just under 1 year old SSD by Crucial. I've lost important psd files of our work that we were planning to print on high-end Epson photo printer and doing an exhibition. I've managed to get the flattened tiffs + pdfs back from the magazine, but those were already converted (by me) to 8 bits and smallish CMYK color space.
Since that accident, I've blacklisted anything by Crucial and keep 4 backups of important stuff + 2 backups of everything else. CCC is the main tool. No TimeMachine.

@TheShortTimer - I'm glad it's going well for you. Please do share the results. I might try the Linux route on my SSD too some day, although I have absolutely zero experience with that OS.

Yeah, Time Machine has been and continues to be a total bust for me. I use it only when it's my only option. It's extremely picky about where you save and God help you if you need to move the backup. You can't schedule it at all and it has a tendency to mess up backups to network volumes. Once that happens, getting it going again to the same location is an exercise in frustration. I've had several times where it just decided to create a NEW backup in the same location instead of backing up to the OLD backup.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks for the replies, I'll look into a RAID/NAS setup.

DIY for this is fairly easy, especially if all you're intending to do is a RAID. Just find a cheap RAID enclosure on eBay or somewhere and drop in a couple of drives of the same capacity. Depending on what you've got you can either do a RAID 0 or a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks). RAID 0 gives you one drive with the capacity of both. So, two 1TB drives would be a 2TB RAID drive. JBOD would present you with the standard two 1TB drives.

The only thing limiting you here is the circuitry. Some RAID enclosures max out at 2TB, 4TB, 6TB and so on. So, you'll need to know what you've got before you drop drives in. My Fantom Drives enclosure is limited to two 1TB drives, while the RAID enclosure in the garage is 6TB (but I only had two 2TB drives to stick in it when I got it).

NAS enclosures work pretty much the same way, but you get a GUI to connect with on your network. You set the NAS up there and you can determine your options. I have two, one a Zyxel and one a Synology. These cost a bit more than RAID drive enclosures, but the additional benefits are worth it. RAID enclosures have to be plugged in to a computer and shared. If the computer is not on, no sharing. A NAS is it's own entity and is 'on' the network.

My Zyxel NAS was around $80 or so. Most people selling them do not include drives, but I lucked out with my Synology a few months back as the seller included the drives. Both my Zyxel and my Synology are 6TB (two 3TB drives per NAS) and I have them set as RAID 0.

You can choose a different RAID level if you want redundancy instead of just a combine drive. I use RAID 0 on all this simple because of the nature of my backups.

Finally, if you just want a drive enclosure that handles one drive those are out there too. I have a uGreen drive enclosure that is currently sharing a 2TB drive, but it's capable of sharing 6TB I believe. The drive enclosure cost around $30 I think.

Much cheaper just to DIY and provide your own drives.

 

[TheShortTimer]

@eyoungren Thanks for the lowdown. I'm already looking at contenders on eBay and just need to decide how many drives I want available to me.

Speaking of eBay...

Much cheaper just to DIY and provide your own drives.

Typically I'd search on eBay for drives but I'm now extremely wary of that after this episode and others with faulty/dead drives and I came across this Reddit thread that warns people not to purchase HDDs from eBay because they're likely to be used/refurbished and presented as new by manipulating the SMART info etc.

Unless it's scaremongering, I'll need to find new and trustworthy sources.

 

[eyoungren]

@eyoungren Thanks for the lowdown. I'm already looking at contenders on eBay and just need to decide how many drives I want available to me.

Speaking of eBay...



Typically I'd search on eBay for drives but I'm now extremely wary of that after this episode and others with faulty/dead drives and I came across this Reddit thread that warns people not to purchase HDDs from eBay because they're likely to be used/refurbished and presented as new by manipulating the SMART info etc.

Unless it's scaremongering, I'll need to find new and trustworthy sources.

Totally get that and that's one reason that I stick to a specific brand of drives, at least for HDs. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I've been fortunate not to get any drives that go bad quickly. OTOH, I tend to buy either WD Red drives (for NAS) and WD RE drives which are enterprise drives and the type you'd find in data centers. RE drives require a bit more power but between them and WD Reds they claim to last longer.

My new NAS has WD drives from 2011, WD Greens (which are lower power). The two WD Reds I have in my 2TB enclosure were bought off eBay when they were both about a month old. I think that was probably like 2014 or so. The rest is a mix of 2008 to about 2018 I think. I have only one drive, a 6TB WD RE in my MacPro that gives me any difficulty. It won't appear on the desktop when doing a warm boot. I have to cold boot. Otherwise, no issues.

Whatever brand you are partial to, just do your research and use eBay's buyer protection if necessary. A tip off is if a seller won't allow a return or has a short window for it.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Totally get that and that's one reason that I stick to a specific brand of drives, at least for HDs. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I've been fortunate not to get any drives that go bad quickly. OTOH, I tend to buy either WD Red drives (for NAS) and WD RE drives which are enterprise drives and the type you'd find in data centers. RE drives require a bit more power but between them and WD Reds they claim to last longer.

My new NAS has WD drives from 2011, WD Greens (which are lower power). The two WD Reds I have in my 2TB enclosure were bought off eBay when they were both about a month old. I think that was probably like 2014 or so. The rest is a mix of 2008 to about 2018 I think. I have only one drive, a 6TB WD RE in my MacPro that gives me any difficulty. It won't appear on the desktop when doing a warm boot. I have to cold boot. Otherwise, no issues.

I'll take a look at the WD drives. I spoke to Seagate's customer services dept and they informed me that even if they're described as new, there is no warranty provided for their drives unless they have been purchased from a list of authorised resellers. It's a small list that predictably excludes 99.99999% of eBay sellers. I'll have to check whether the other manufacturers have a similar policy but it's likely that they do.

Here's an HDD that arrived today from one of their approved stockists. Note the date of manufacture...

Note the inclusion of a warranty pamphlet.

Set up in Disk Utility and ready for use.

Whatever brand you are partial to, just do your research and use eBay's buyer protection if necessary. A tip off is if a seller won't allow a return or has a short window for it.

Filtering out "no returns" drastically reduced the search results.

 

[eyoungren]

I'll take a look at the WD drives. I spoke to Seagate's customer services dept and they informed me that even if they're described as new, there is no warranty provided for their drives unless they have been purchased from a list of authorised resellers. It's a small list that predictably excludes 99.99999% of eBay sellers. I'll have to check whether the other manufacturers have a similar policy but it's likely that they do.

Here's an HDD that arrived today from one of their approved stockists. Note the date of manufacture...

Note the inclusion of a warranty pamphlet.

Set up in Disk Utility and ready for use.

Filtering out "no returns" drastically reduced the search results.

If you do go with WD, they make it kind of easy to figure out.

WD Blue is your stock HD for a typical Mac or PC. What most people would buy.
WD Green is for low power setups, typically drives that do not see a lot of seek access. They can take a moment to spool up.
WD Black are higher performance HDs, usually for gaming PCs or PCs used for more demanding software.
WD Red are for NAS (as I mentioned). Do be careful with these as WD pulled a dirty trick at some point with the disk caching. You can look that up, but basically some WD Reds are slower because WD chintzed out.
WD Purple are for video systems, i.e., security systems. I've never used one of these so I can't speak to it.
WD Gold (renamed RE) are for data centers/servers. I tend to use those in my MacPro because of the promise of their longevity.

I'm not sure how WD repeats this with SSDs, I think all their SSDs are just the Blue label, but not sure. I buy a different brand for SSDs.

Jan 2024 for your Seagate is pretty good! 👍

 

[ojfd]

WD Green line has been discontinued long time ago.
With WD Reds one has to watch out - they've moved some of those models to SMR technology:

https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/#WD_CMR_SMR_drive_list

We discussed WD drives/RAID enclosures with our resident @B S Magnet a bit here:

Best Apple Laptop that can run Snow Leopard and older

Short sidebar, concluded: For Snow Leopard, you will want this version of the WD Drive Manager (v3.10.14). Firmware for the WD My Book Studio series relied on WD Green HDDs. WD stopped making those a while ago. When they ended that line, they moved WD Green-line customers to a specific line of...

forums.macrumors.com

and here:

WD My Book Studio II question

WD MyBook II is somewhat finicky and a bit of a pain in the behind. I have one here.. One definitely have to use tools written by WD to initialize/configure drives, because, as far as I understand, they write RAID configuration into drive's firmware (!). I used WD Raid Manager 1.1.5 (part of WD...

forums.macrumors.com

WD SSDs are basically SanDisk, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[eyoungren]

WD Green line has been discontinued long time ago.

No wonder most of my WD Greens are dated.

With WD Reds one has to watch out - they've moved some of those models to SMR technology:

https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/#WD_CMR_SMR_drive_list

We discussed WD drives/RAID enclosures with our resident @B S Magnet a bit here:

Best Apple Laptop that can run Snow Leopard and older

Short sidebar, concluded: For Snow Leopard, you will want this version of the WD Drive Manager (v3.10.14). Firmware for the WD My Book Studio series relied on WD Green HDDs. WD stopped making those a while ago. When they ended that line, they moved WD Green-line customers to a specific line of...

forums.macrumors.com

and here:

WD My Book Studio II question

WD MyBook II is somewhat finicky and a bit of a pain in the behind. I have one here.. One definitely have to use tools written by WD to initialize/configure drives, because, as far as I understand, they write RAID configuration into drive's firmware (!). I used WD Raid Manager 1.1.5 (part of WD...

forums.macrumors.com

WD SSDs are basically SanDisk, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, the SMR thing is what I meant with WD Reds. Just couldn't recall the name of it.

Long ago, when PCs were my thing, Maxtor was my brand. But then Maxtor disappeared (company was sold/bought out) and WD came next. With me buying more SSDs now, WD is on the way out here in my house.

 

[B S Magnet]

We discussed WD drives/RAID enclosures with our resident @B S Magnet a bit here:

Best Apple Laptop that can run Snow Leopard and older

Short sidebar, concluded: For Snow Leopard, you will want this version of the WD Drive Manager (v3.10.14). Firmware for the WD My Book Studio series relied on WD Green HDDs. WD stopped making those a while ago. When they ended that line, they moved WD Green-line customers to a specific line of...

forums.macrumors.com

and here:

WD My Book Studio II question

WD MyBook II is somewhat finicky and a bit of a pain in the behind. I have one here.. One definitely have to use tools written by WD to initialize/configure drives, because, as far as I understand, they write RAID configuration into drive's firmware (!). I used WD Raid Manager 1.1.5 (part of WD...

forums.macrumors.com

WD SSDs are basically SanDisk, if I'm not mistaken.

As with Hitachi/HGST HDDs several years ago, SanDisk were bought by WD (WD did have their own SSDs before the purchase, but they were a secondary product line, not a principal one). This is to say: it’s the inverse of what you described above, though I’ve no doubt some of the controller and NAND tech from SanDisk SSDs made their way onto new-gen WD SSDs.

SanDisk-branded SSDs nowadays are, as far as I know, coming from the same assembly line as WD SSDs. At this time, I wouldn’t be able to say which SanDisk model corresponds with its WD model counterpart.

WD Green line has been discontinued long time ago.

For spinners, correct. The “Green” line is now reserved for entry-level SSDs lacking a DRAM cache. They’re basically the WD Blue SSD, but the Blue has that DRAM cache. (The DRAM cache is well worth it.)

With WD Reds one has to watch out - they've moved some of those models to SMR technology:

https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/#WD_CMR_SMR_drive_list

General rule of thumb: SMR is a feature to avoid — an engineering blunder on WD’s part, given the extra wear and energy needed to write/move data on the platters. (SMR also appeared on a very limited set of WD Blue HDDs and on at least one WD Black HDD model.)

The above is also a handy tool for verifying which drives across the major manufacturers — WD, Seagate, Toshiba — use SMR. From that table, it appears SMR has appeared most frequently on the Seagate Barracuda line.