ORICO 6629 Series USB3.0 Dual Bay Docking Station

[SheppardSammy]

Hi All!

My system specs are as follows:
Mac Pro (Mid 2012)
2x2.4 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
Running Yosemite (Version 10.10.1)

I just had a 4 TB Western Digital MyBook (2x2TB drives internally) die on me. There is still power to it, but it just blinks, and doesn't mount.

In an effort to save the data, I purchased an ORICO 6629 series dual bay SATA hard drive dock, and took the WD drives out of the casing. However, when I plug the hard drives into the dock, a warning comes up and says "You have inserted a drive that is unreadable" and it gives me three options, one of which is initialize. I press "initialize, and it takes me to disc utility, but I can't do anything from there.

Scoured the internet with no dice. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[monokakata]

I don't know much about the MyBook but I think that what you have is 2 x 2 TB configured as RAID0, which means that Disk Utility can't make sense out of what each drive is, individually.

Perhaps somebody who knows a lot about RAID0 will help you. My suggestion for now is -- don't do anything! So long as you haven't initialized or otherwise messed with the drives, you might have a chance of getting them into an enclosure that supports RAID.

I have one of those Orico units and it works properly for single drives, but is not a RAID-capable dock.

 

[SheppardSammy]

Thanks for the reply, monokakata!

That's good advice, and most likely the right answer!

Hopefully other people also have some good solutions!

 

[crjackson2134]

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[ActionableMango]

I'll assume you don't have a backup of your data, in which case, definitely do not initialize anything, format anything, or attempt to do anything that will perform write procedures to the drives.

First I would call Western Digital support or check the manual to see if the pattern of blinks means anything useful and proceed from there.

Failing that, you may be on your own. The 4TB MyBook, as you state, is two 2TB drives in one RAID enclosure. The enclosure is user-selectable for either RAID 0 or 1. This is crucially important.

If you selected RAID 1, then the drives are mirrored and so each drive contains duplicate information. In this configuration you have 2TB of space to use because the data is mirrored. If one died, the other will still have the data, so you could try to mount the other drive and see if it comes up.

Probably you selected RAID 0, in which the two drives are striped, meaning the data for every single file is spread across the two drives. This is terrible and you are twice as likely to lose your information from a drive crash. But it's probably the mode you selected since it gets you 4TB of space. In this case, you are basically screwed if either of the drives died. You could try a data recovery place, but they'll charge you tons of money. If the enclosure died and both drives are fine, you might be able to recover all of your data by buying an identical unit, pulling the new drives out, and putting your drives in.

OTOH, if you do have backup of your data, just get this thing replaced under warranty and copy your data back to the new unit.