Does a WD MyBook have a trouble light?

June 26, 2009 9:55 AM

How to tell if WD MyBook mirroring has failed or drive has died?

Getting ready to send my little sister off to college on another continent. She'll be taking an external hard drive with her to backup to (plus the Mozy Unlimited that she's already on, because if it's only backed up once, it's not backed up). My current thinking is to send her with one of those dual-drive WD MyBooks, probably 2TB mirrored down to 1TB.

I'm fairly distrusting of the WD software, so I'll be setting up some mirroring with SyncBack Free (at least two, if not 3 backup sets at nightly, weekly, and monthly intervals).

Main question: if she's not running the WD bundled software, will she get a visible indicator if 1 of the 2 RAID1 hard drives fails? Even a red LED will be fine. I realize there's no way Windows would recognize the failure, so the only thing I can imagine would be something built into the hardware.

posted by mysterious1der to technology (3 comments total)

I did check here but didn't find the answer to my specific question. And Google obviously.
posted by mysterious1der at 9:57 AM on June 26

The support page for one of the mirror editions here has a link to the PDF version of the manual. On one page it says what I suspected: RAID issues are indicated by funny lights on the front.

Appearance : Drive State
Steady :Power-on state or power-save mode
Slow flashing (every four seconds) : System standby
Moving up and down : Drive in use
Alternating checkerboard pattern : Transitioning from one state to another
Alternate flashing between top and bottom LEDs : RAID degraded mode
Cycling from bottom to top : RAID rebuild mode
Fast flashing (every second) :Over-temperature condition*
posted by phearlez at 12:19 PM on June 26

Wonderful, thanks phearlez. Exactly what I wanted to know.
posted by mysterious1der at 2:13 PM on June 26