I have recently purchased this HD hoping that the 2x 500GB harddrives could be setup as a RAID 1 setup but alas it only shows up as a single 1TB Drive using a Mac (and also PC). This model appears to be a detuned Drivestation Duo available in the Asia Pacific region and supports USB only. I have tried using the RAID utility for DUO but they do not work on this drive.
My next option is to partition the drive in half (which I have done). My questions relate to this and the recovery of files if one of the drives were to fail.
1. Does partitioning the drive in half (using Mac OSX 10.5.x) result in a physical or logical seperation of the harddrives?
2. If I then save one large file (or any file for that matter) to one of the partitions, will the file be written completely to one drive only? This will mean that if one of the disks were to fail then I can at least recover the maximum amount of files as possible.
3. Is there a way of getting the drives to show seperately?
BTW I have experimented by copying a 4.19GB file onto one of the partitions and mostly the drive associated with that partition will show activity on the front display of the drivestation, however every now and then the other drive will show activity for <0.5 secs during the process which makes me question whether part of the file is also written to the other drive. This will reduce the likelyhood of recovering files if one of the drives were to fail.
1. Neither. Partitioning the drive will not separate the drives. In RAID0, the data is still striped between both disks.
2. In RAID0, the data is striped across the disks, so some of the file is on the first disk, the rest is on the second.
3. You can set up the drive to use RAID0, RAID1, or JBOD (two independant drives). You'll need to use the Raid setup utility on the CD to do this.
Hi Colin137,
Thanks for the reply and response. The drivestation I purchased is not the Duo (with Raid option), it looks to be a de tuned version of the Duo as it's the same box and didn't come with the Raid utility on the disk. I've tried using the utilities via download but they don't work either. Only one drive shows.
Having 2 drives I was hoping that this would provide better backup security, but seeing as it appears that I am unable to separate the disks then there is now 2 points of failure meaning it has doubled my chance of losing my data - this is not what I had hoped for when I purchased the drive.
Any other thoughts or anything I'm missing in trying to separate the drives?
The RAID utility should be on the CD... look for a RAID folder in the Bin\EasySetup folder.
If you can't find it on the CD try the RAID utility here:
ftp://24.153.165.234/disk1/share/HD-WSU2/
If that doesn't work, try the versions here:
ftp://24.153.165.234/disk1/share/HD-WSIU2/
Hi Colin 137,
There's no Raid utility on the CD. Maybe I'm missing a cd. The only one it came with was a cd titled Drivestation Navigator - no raid utility on that.
Next I downloaded and tried the first Utility in your last post. Installed and ran it and observed the following:
1. Message appeared: Searching for devices.ll This may take a few moments.
2. Next Message appeared after 10 seconds or so: "Failed to lock USB mass storage disk drive."
3. Clicked ok and the following message appeared: "Device isn't connected Press ok to continue."
And that's it. Looked promising but still no joy. The device is showing up as: "Local Disk (E:)" on PC so its definitely connected and can see it. Any clues?
Tried other link. Froze Laptop a couple of times when trying to download directly to USB drive and third and subsequent times its now asking for a password.
Update to last post.
I'm now able to download the other utilities from ftp://24.153.165.234/disk1/share/HD-WSIU2/ will keep you updated on how I go.
As an alternative is there a RAID utility for Intel based Mac's? This is what I'm trying to set up the hard drive for.
There is not.
We only made one for power pc based macs.
Ok I've tried all the utilities provided on the previous post in this thread with no luck. I've now tried about 5 utilities with no luck. All but one eventually comes back with: "Device isn't connected Press ok to continue."
The one utility that didn't come back with this comes back with a C++ runtime error. This was on the utility that looked like it was for my Drivestation. It was labelled as: DS TurboUSB 2x500 RAID Utility. All the others were for the Duo.
I haven't tried the Mac PowerPC utility as my Mac in an Intel based one. Does anybody out there know if this will be more successful? I'm having trouble finding a PowerPC based Mac. Also if I run this utility and am successful on a PowerPC based Mac, will this make it show up as 2 drives on my Intel based Mac or am I wasting my time?
Is there any other way I can make this appear as 2 drives - logically or physically??
2. Next Message appeared after 10 seconds or so: "Failed to lock USB mass storage disk drive."
I got mine to work when I disconnected a second USB-harddrive that was connected to the computer. Hope this helps someone.