Air Disk, Western Digital MyBook

[Schmoe0013]

My question is, does anyone have a external usb Western Digital MyBook that has 2 hard drives raided internally. For example

http://westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=341

Will this work with AirDisk?

If someone is currently doing this, does it work, or are there problems?


Also, is it possible to do more than 1 external hard drive to hook up to air disk. I have two, one 2tb western digital (link above) and a standard maxtor 750gig.

Thanks in advance.

 

[TEG]

As long as it appears as one drive to the computer when connected (it is Hardware RAID not Software RAID) it should work fine.

TEG

 

[Schmoe0013]

Excellent.

And the airport should be able to support multiple hard drives plugged in? eg, more than 1?

 

[aross99]

The external drive shouldn't be a problem, but AirDisk is currently very unreliable in my experience. I'm hoping that the release of Time Capsule also brings an updated firmware for the AEBS to fix these issues.

Worst problem is the inability to connect to the drive after any device goes to sleep with the drive mounted. With my MBP that would be every day, unless I remember to unmount the drive every time I close the lid. Rebooting the router gets you going again.

it worked great for a couple of firmware revisions, and then they release one that causes this problem.

We have been waiting for months for this to be fixed...

 

[ascender]

I've not used a RAID'd My Book, but I have tried a couple of other My Books as Airdisk attached drives and they've been nothing but problems tbh. After a few days I just gave up and shared them off my iMac instead.

Airdisk is really flaky at the moment, so I wouldn't hope for much from it just now. Of course, you could be lucky and it might work flawlessly for you as it has for some other people.

I'm hoping the release of Time Capsule brings some sort of fix for Airdisk.

 

[mojoxp]

I've got the drive you mentioned, setup in RAID1. The combination of Leopard, latest firmware for the drive, and the 7.2.1 firmware for the AirPort has made it really a nice setup. The drive goes to sleep when not in active use, and wakes up properly now... overall I'm really happy.

 

[aross99]

I've got the drive you mentioned, setup in RAID1. The combination of Leopard, latest firmware for the drive, and the 7.2.1 firmware for the AirPort has made it really a nice setup. The drive goes to sleep when not in active use, and wakes up properly now... overall I'm really happy.

Are you using this successfully with AirDisk? I lose connectivity to my drives every time my MBP goes to sleep with the drive mounted.

 

[CanadaRAM]

The problem with AirDisk and USB drives (let alone more than one USB drive) is that USB requires the 'computer's' CPU to do a fair bit of the drive management. And the AEBS's tiny little brain doesn't have enough horsepower to devote to even one USB drive to run it at full speed as well as handle wireless chores.

It's a stunningly bad idea IMO, a NAS drive with it's own dedicated Ethernet controller would be better. A dedicated Mac Mini with Firewire drives would be even better.

 

[aross99]

What upsets me, is that one version of the AEBS firmware (7.1.1?) worked fine for the Airdisk, but unfortunately had other issues for printing. Then they release the current version, and Airdisk is broken. At least printing works now.

How long does it take for them to fix the Airdisk issues? I'm not talking about Time machine here - just get the disk access to work - reliably.

Im curious if it works for anyone after their computer goes to sleep with a mounted volume?

 

[pcharles]

Avoid the WD Raid

You should find something other than the WD RAID. It has become a thorn in my side. I bought it as a backup for Time Machine, but if there is not enough activity it unmounts and shuts down. Then you need to push the front button to get it going again.

If your traveling, or not next to the computer, you are SOL when it shuts down. You can kind of get around it by setting the OS to never sleep drives, but now your drives are running 24/7. I need to do something about it soon and maybe move this to my backup of the backup, but its quite an outlay to do this.