Will preclear work on an encrypted WD My Book?

[emmcee]

According to WD Support page, it must be the same size or larger. Failing that I expect there is a market for empty enclosures as if you are running RAID and the enclosure dies, you need another WD enclosure to retrieve your data due to hardware encryption.

 

I imagine the market for 3 1/2 year old WD Reds isn't too hot though!

[gubbgnutten]

On 4/26/2017 at 5:19 PM, emmcee said:

Sill, cheap WD reds - whats not to like!

 

Just make sure the size is fine. People have had problems with harvested drives (sold as real reds) being just a tad smaller than a real red drive of the same expected size...

[emmcee]

Kinda surprised at that. Worst case scenario is that you add it as a parity and recycle your parity as a new data drive. Although at at that price I'll be buying another MyBook when I need more space. 

 

One thing i did notice is the warranty is 750 days instead of 3 years. I have a ticket open with WD to see if they will bump it to 3 years. Worth a try. 

[emmcee]

So it seems that you can replace the MyBook drives with smaller capacity reds (3 TB in my case). The WD tools throw an error when you change the configuration (it can do RAID0, RAID1 and JBOD) but it seems to work. I used Disk Management on Windows 10 to format the drive and I'm currently running the WD diagnostics, but it looks to be good to go. Now to find a buyer...