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Not RAID unless you want to do a software RAID.

Right. External USB devices lie about when and where they write data, to optimize. It's NOT a direct interface. As such, RAID'ing two external USB devices through software is a great way to lose data if the smallest thing ever goes wrong - loss of power, someone unplugs a drive (as one tends to do with external storage)...

Terrible, terrible idea, even in the best situation. After hours of research I went with a dedicated NAS for this very reason, rather than a $260 ghetto-rigged old laptop running external drives.

Based on my brief trial with a WD Live NAS, my confidence in their software engineering abilities is BELOW zero.

Now software RAID for internal drives, that's another story... Mmm, Synology Hybrid RAID... :)
 
Are my WD ok if I never installed their software?

Have one for time machine and another one for media content.
 
So this is only happens if you use their software on Mavericks to access the hard drives?

So not a Mavericks flaw but WD's? Or maybe both, but because WD writes software for the Mac, they should've been accessing developer builds of Mavericks and would've found this out long ago.

Didn't happen with GM1 which i had on my iMac for quite a while before upgrading to the final version, and it didn't happen on the first 4 boots or so. to other people it happened on the final boot of installation.
 
That is why it is advised to use the LATEST Apple Disk Utility version in the LATEST Mac OS X version to format disks.
 
There seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around. A couple of points that should be noted. All talk of quality of WD hardware would seem irrelevant to the issue here.

1) When using a product with hardware RAID, you need the WD Drive Manager installed to manage the RAID array, and check it's health.

2) It is capable of wrecking the partition scheme on more than just WD drives: it managed to nuke a DMG I was using for virtual machine files. Like everyone else that had issues, it was reduced to a small EFI partition (IIRC) and a MyBook partition with the balance of the space.

Thankfully, I was able to pull a good copy from Time Machine backup. Even more thankfully, the WD software didn't manage to nuke that...
 
WD Disaster after removing WD Drive Manager

Eight of my mirrored 1TB WD Raid Drives got lost after uninstalling WD Drive Manager.

Even my backups have gone, I can stop with my work!
 
The WD Smartware uninstaller just hangs and needs killed. How are you supposed to uninstall it and its daemon?
 
The WD Smartware uninstaller just hangs and needs killed. How are you supposed to uninstall it and its daemon?

Tried trashing the app and rebooting and the daemon is still running. Anyone know how to remove this?

----------

Tried trashing the app and rebooting and the daemon is still running. Anyone know how to remove this?

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.WesternDigital.WDSmartWareD.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.WesternDigital.WDSmartWareD.plist
sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.WDDMservice.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.WDDMservice.plist

Then trash the /Library/Application Support/WDSmartWare folder

The only thing left in Activity monitor is wdhelper but that appears to be one of Apple's daemons.
 
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I lost data today with my WD 500GB black drive (external, USB3), but I didn't use any proprietary software with it.

So I think there's a serious issue with Mavericks and WD drives that is not limited to their software.
 
I took the risk to connect my WD MyBook for Time Machine and all is just fine.

I have two partitions on the drive -- one for regular storage and the other for Time Machine. Both are formatted in Mac OS Extended Journaled and I have never had any WD software installed. The drive is also connected through a USB hub, if that could make any difference at all.

So I used it to do a time machine backup, installed a new hard drive in my macbook (seagate hybrid drive), fresh installed Mavericks on the new hard drive and used the time machine drive again. Before and after, everything seems fine.

I've read some posts of people saying it was fine for a couple of days and then it went to shoes. So I think I'll still use it sparingly for the time being.

*Also, my computer is a 2009 13inch MacBook Pro.
 
To everyone that "lost data", you actually never did loose any data, its just that the partition table got corrupted or something to that effect, if you run a recovery software, all your data is still there.
 
To everyone that "lost data", you actually never did loose any data, its just that the partition table got corrupted or something to that effect, if you run a recovery software, all your data is still there.

At least "disk repair" from OSX was unable to recover it. I really appreciate my backups in such situations.
 
Best solution is to get with the times and stop using spinning hard drives.

SSD's aren't the best solution either. If you don't have a backup solution, when SSD's go bad there's no file recover options. When a spinning hard drive goes bad, you still have options to recover files.

No matter how much you tell people to have a backup solution in place, most people don't. SSD's are going to be a rude awakening for those individuals.
 
SSD's aren't the best solution either. If you don't have a backup solution, when SSD's go bad there's no file recover options. When a spinning hard drive goes bad, you still have options to recover files.

No matter how much you tell people to have a backup solution in place, most people don't. SSD's are going to be a rude awakening for those individuals.

Could you please explain why there would be recovery options for spinning hard drives as opposed solid state?
 
Same thing happen to me. Are you able to format to use the drive again? Mine is pretty much makes clicking noise and eventually shows up and cannot format.

Mine is saying the Partition cannot be repaired. I cannot Mount the drive at all. I haven't tried Re-formatting the drive altogether yet. I am still trying to recover the data. the HDD was 80% full at a 2TB with Movies and TV Shows.
 
not just WD

My seagate 3TB drive wiped and reformatted as MyBook and EFI partitions - all data lost.
 
SSD's aren't the best solution either. If you don't have a backup solution, when SSD's go bad there's no file recover options. When a spinning hard drive goes bad, you still have options to recover files.

No matter how much you tell people to have a backup solution in place, most people don't. SSD's are going to be a rude awakening for those individuals.

Could you please explain why there would be recovery options for spinning hard drives as opposed solid state?

There is still a lot of "myth" that people mistakenly take as fact, like "SSD's not having recovery options".

First, if we're talking about file/data corruption. The recovery options are very similar. You can rebuild partition tables, scan for file patterns, etc...

Second, if we're talking about physical failure it's a well established fact that SSDs fail far less frequently than HDs and when they do, contrary to the myth, there are still recovery options available by sending them off to the same recovery specialists that specialize in recovering data from physically damaged hard drives.
 
To everyone that "lost data", you actually never did loose any data, its just that the partition table got corrupted or something to that effect, if you run a recovery software, all your data is still there.

At least "disk repair" from OSX was unable to recover it. I really appreciate my backups in such situations.

WD made it clear in their emails. If your drive looks formatted disconnect it and CALL THEM. In this case they seem sincerely willing to help, I wouldn't touch it on my own in spite of being fairly well versed in data recovery. I repeat I wouldn't touch it on my own in this case...

If you're a cowboy... The best free data recovery option is TestDisk. It'll let you rebuilt partition tables and find lost files.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download

The best commercial solution IMHO is Data Rescue 3
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

There are others... but Disk Utility won't cut it. It's for maintenance, not data recovery.
 
If your data loss meets the following criteria then please leave a comment on http://wd-mavericks-data-loss.com/:

  • OSX Mavericks 10.9
  • any external drive is initialised to a single MyBook partition with exposed EFI partition
  • WD Drive Manager / RAID Manager installed

At this time there are no known solutions for full recovery of directory data structures.

If you have found a solution for full data recovery then please leave a comment on the recovery options page so that we can investigate and let others know.
 
It happened again today. While I'm not losing the entire disk, it seems that disk i/o with larger files makes them disappear.

I copied a 5GB file over a slow network and during that operation (takes about 20 minutes) the source file became unavailable. It's half-copied now, but the source file is gone.

The entire disk is active all the time.
 
Mine is saying the Partition cannot be repaired. I cannot Mount the drive at all. I haven't tried Re-formatting the drive altogether yet. I am still trying to recover the data. the HDD was 80% full at a 2TB with Movies and TV Shows.

Ah okay. Maybe remove the WD software if you have it. I didn't install WD software so mine might be an actual hdd failure.
 
Warning is an official announcement saying we will end support on X date. After X date you are on borrowed time.
Deprecated API does not equal warning. Warning = announcement and official hard dates.

SO yes blame sits mostly on Apple followed by Apple has a history of breaking crap.

This is where you're incorrect.

When Apple announces an API as deprecated it means "Do not use this API going forward, it is likely to be withdrawn at any time"

This is known among Apple devs.
 
Could you please explain why there would be recovery options for spinning hard drives as opposed solid state?

He oversimplifying it and vague about what he means.
Out of three scenarios I'll mention, he's probably referring to the last one.

For commercial data recovery from a defective device...
Recovery from spinning platters is much more understood. There's typically no encryption. The most renown recovery companies have contacts with hard drive manufacturers in which they're given design documents to the drives of every generation or to engineers who can assist. The general design of these drives also do not vary much from generation to generation. Experience is high.

SSDs on the other hand, change significantly between manufacturer and generation. Data formats on-chip are heavily tied to the firmware that wrote them. Some, like Sandforce, use encryption on the fly, so dumping the chips for analysis may get you nothing useful without understanding both the compression scheme, the encryption, and some way of extracting the key.
Others change from MLC to TLC NAND, which requires entirely different error correction methods because of the magnitude difference in reliability. Some data recovery companies do have partnerships with manufacturers, but it's rare, and much more expensive.

For somebody trying to do recovery at home using tools like photorec/testdisk/etc:

With a spinning platter, if it reads most of it and has unrecoverable sectors in some area, you'll be able to get most of the data back using just tools downloadable from the web for free or minimal cost. You can still plug it in, and most dying disks will still give you some chance to read some of it.

With SSDs, when their firmware crashes or the NAND is at their end of life, most will NOT enter a read-only mode. They'll simply brick themselves. Sad but true. In most of these cases, they'll be working fine one day, and then all of a sudden disappear on you, and then it's over.
The only drive I've seen which actually did enter read-only mode once it's dead uses the notorious JMicron 601 controller (the one with all the stutter problems). Everything else I've seen die, just dies.

Finally, file recovery from a good drive/SSD, but the problem is that somebody deleted a file that you want back:

If the platter disk is fine, but somebody deleted a few files, it depends on if they simply deleted it or overwrote it. (delete just removes the markers telling the file system it's there, the data hasn't actually been overwritten) Tools can recover from that sometimes. (see testdisk/photorec)

If the SSD is actually fine, and somebody deleted a few files you wish they didn't, then you better hope you don't have TRIM enabled. Because if you do, TRIM will do its job and wipe the entire file off disk with no hope of recovery of that file. Not even the manufacturer's top engineers nor the NSA will be able to get it back (unless TRIM is broken on that firmware).
 
At least.....

WD team had isolated the culprit in this data loss. I have a great respect for WD drives, not having none of them dying on me. Still have a 250 GB external from 2008, that had have a lot of stress and moving with me around travels. But as a custom, I never used any software that came with the WD drives, so I guess I will not have problem with a recent batch of RED disks I had bought......:D


:):apple:
 
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