Mavericks corrupts external hard drives!

I have a WD portable drive and so far its been rock solid, no issues with Mavericks. The same goes with my Drobo mini.

It looks like if you install the software from WD, that's where things can get tricky.

There's a thread here about Pegasus TB drives incurring similar issues when Mavericks was in beta, so its definitely something to keep an eye on.

beyond said:

So far I think people having this major problem have their units working in raid mode.

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That seems to fit with the Pegasus issue during the beta period.

As I mentioned I'm running my Drobo Mini (using their proprietary RAID implementation) with Mavericks and so far no issues.

does anyone have more information on this?

i use several external drives, they are all independent, no RAID configurations but i am still very worried by this thread. i have alot of data that is vulnerable since i dont own enough drives to back up what i have.

ironically i have been runing mavericks on an external drive itsself, i haven't had an issue, but i have so much of my itunes meda etc on my drives.

I have an external WD 1TB drive that was a time machine backup device. It was corrupted yesterday by Mavericks and the drive is now lost. Neither Drive Genius or Diskwarrior or Disk Utility could recover it. FWIW.

I've been running Mavericks with multiple external USB and Firewire 800 drives for months, without any issues. None of them are WD or involve any proprietary drivers (other than Paragon NTFS 10). Specifically, I have a 1TB Seagate drive in a USB 3.0 dock that holds my music, photos, and development projects; a 4TB Seagate Backup Plus USB 3.0 drive that is devoted to Time Machine; and two 4TB G-Tech Firewire 800 drives formatted to NTFS that hold the upstairs copy of our video library. I have a second USB 3.0 dock that is used to swap various bare drives in and out (rotated clone backups and a Windows 8 boot volume).

I've had no data integrity issues. (But I assume drives are going to fail, so everything is still backed up, generally more than once.)

Running 2 Buffalo DriveStation's (1TB each) on FW800 (Late 09 mini) with no issues. Used as both storage and TM backup.

EDIT: The drives in the DriveStations are Seagate... so it appears your issues are largely confined to WD drives. I have had nearly a dozen failed MyBooks in the past so I shun them now.

I haven't lost any data, but my 3 TB USB 3 WD drive is doing something all the time. It's like it's reading/writting something, but no app registers that. Also when i boot in ML it's operates differently even under load. Something is really wrong with the driver or something.

yesterday my external time machine backup suddenly gave me the error message: drive is read only, i couldn't repartition it nor repairing it, so only thing that worked is that I erase the partition, and now its working again.
seems there is something wrong with mavericks.

Oh, yes it's bad

Yesterday, my time machine drive -- a Western Digital MyBook Studio II 6 TB, RAID 0, connected via Apple's Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter -- came up empty and with a different name. It looked just like when i bought it.

It was the second time I connected it since moving to Mavericks. The first time everything seemed OK. I have several other WDC drives and I don't dare using them now.

Wow, I came on here to search for an answer to my problem, but didnt expect to find something like this So I've got my internal mac mini seagate drive as an external usb one, partitioned to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and ExFAT and whats happening is that Mavericks wont stop indexing the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) partition.


Edit: As I see now, it seems it indexes every time I log in.

beyond said:

So it would seem it's an issue mostly with wd drives.

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Is it the drives or is it the WD software? After reading most of the other discussions on this issue, I'm thinking it's the software. One user in particular, running the WD Manager said that a NON WD external drive was formatted but labeled as a MyBook afterwards. I don't think OS X would do that.

I stuck in the same situation. My WD Mybook Studio II was bought just 6 months ago. Now it's labeled MyBook and emptied. Is there any suggestion? There's all my CD ripped in it. I really don't want to work a month again.

I just updated and mavericks is playing. Nicely with my 3tb seagate external. Back. Ups are going as scheduled no issues just smooth sailing which is why I'm on a Mac to begin with.

FWIW I've got no less than three WD drives rotating as Time Machine backups. Two of them are WD MyPassport USB 3 externals (2GB and 1GB respectively) for on-the-go backups and the third is a WD MyBook Live connected to my router as a simple NAS (with the built-in Time Machine server enabled.) The MyBook Live is being accessed as a simple, no-frills shared storage both from my PC and several Macs running OS X Mavericks. All three drives work without issues with OS X Mavericks but then I'm not using any bundled WD software at all apart from (of course) the WD firmware on the MyBook Live.

Considering that almost all the reports in the linked threads mention WD MyBook Studios and there is the odd mention of the WD Drive Manager as well I highly suspect (but could be wrong) that the issues have something to do with software incompatibilities between Mavericks and a) bundled WD software or b) the WD firmware for the MyBook Studios.

Personally I've always made sure to avoid installing any manufacturer bundled hard drive software, both on OS X and Windows. Especially if it's WD software...

This is just unbelievable.
Has this happened to Western Digital Elements external hard drives, too?
I'm scared now to connect my hard drives after the update.

So this is why Mavericks is free.

The problem is WD's bundled software hasn't been updated. Personally I never used it as it seemed like a kludge.

beyond said:

So it would seem it's an issue mostly with wd drives.

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I have some WD drives - but when I buy a drive, regardless of maker, I wipe it and reformat it as HFS. Not interested in any of the "helpful" software they've installed.

My external HDD, is a seagate one, but I replaced its internal hdd with a WD Green one, it doesnt have any software or whatsoever, and same issue happened to me

devman said:

I have an external WD 1TB drive that was a time machine backup device. It was corrupted yesterday by Mavericks and the drive is now lost. Neither Drive Genius or Diskwarrior or Disk Utility could recover it. FWIW.

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Oh wow seriously was it a WD Elements by any chance? I have a WD Elements 1.5TB that I do CCC clones with that I'm now scared to use.