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Western Digital My Book Studio II RAID via eSATA
Not so much as a question as an observation. I’m venting…
I have a few of the Western Digital My Book Studio II external RAID enclosures. They’ve been handy mainly for redundant media backups that I store off-site. 1TB, 2TB RAID1, basically two drives in one box with FireWire, USB and eSATA connections. They work fine with FireWire and USB, but it’s the eSATA that was the original draw — fast transfer for really big files. And, simple enclosures that are easy to cart off to storage; inexpensive enough to buy as you need ’em for each large project.
Now, Snow Leopard has its issues with eSATA. Until a short time ago, PCIe cards with the most prevalent chipset out there (SII3132) were kinda dead in the water. Recently, new SII drivers have brought those cards to life. My Granite Digital enclosure is working again like it used to under 10.4 & 10.5. But (and it’s a big but)…
Western Digital external RAID enclosures connected via eSATA cards using the 3132 chip (and maybe others) cause kernel panics. It’s well documented around the traps. Sonnet, a respected manufacturer of eSATA cards even calls out the WD RAID drives on their product pages as being basically useless (well, they say they won’t work… I’m embellishing).
So, I went to the source. I asked WD what PCIe cards were appropriate for their external eSATA hard drives. Here’s the link:
You’d think with a large manufacturer selling more than several different flavors of drives, there’d be some choices, right? Nope. For OS 10.5+ (no mention of 10.6+), there was one, ONE, card. A single port card from Addonics. One card, one port, for MacPros looking to use WD external eSATA drives. Kinda pointless, no? Oh wait — AND IT’S A DISCONTINUED PRODUCT. So, there is NO card being manufactured today that Western Digital recommends for use with their eSATA-capable external RAID storage. Ugh.
This isn’t a disaster for me. I like FireWire’s reliability. But why sell a drive that has a high-speed interface that doesn’t work? Looks nice in the advertising I suppose, but what a waste. You have to wonder who’s asleep at the switch. eSATA is finally getting going again reliably on Mac Pros, except for WD RAIDs. They’re mass-market products being sold in the Apple stores. There’s an expectation that they ought to work.
Anyway, I’ll be knocking on WD’s door about this, and I encourage any of you with an interest to do the same.
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2 Replies
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I have two of these WD drives.
I use the Lycom LYCeSATA-4e PCIe 4 Port card and it works.
I did have to update the drivers to get my card to work. It all works now.I received this email (in October) from MacGurus:
New (beta) Silicon Image drivers are out for Snow Leopard. We are starting our in house testing on these as we speak, but wanted to set you up with links and advise you of their existence. Our testing will take at least several days for a preliminary test on reliability. Several weeks for comprehensive testing. These are beta drivers. That means that Silicon Image also has not completed full compatibility testing and is unwilling to unreservedly state the product is completely compatible. Use with discretion! Make sure you have backups of all data before attaching your database to a host card running beta drivers.
For the Silicon Image 3132 – this is the chipset in 2 port cards for MacBookPro or MacPro tower:
https://www.siliconimage.com/docs/SiI3132_1.1.11u_Sil_Pkg_BETA.zip
For the Silicon Image 3124 driver – this is the chipset on 4 port cards:
https://www.siliconimage.com/docs/SiI3124_2.0.5u_Sil_Pkg_BETA.zip
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Thread necromancy. Over 3 years after the original thread post, the situation hasn’t changed. The WD MyBook Studio II is “incompatible” with eSATA Marvell controllers found in the newer Gigabyte Motherboards, such as the GA-Z77X-UD3H. I have both and my 4 TB drive hangs, disappears, locks the system, acts erratically and so on. Western Digital KB answer 2702 says “incompatible” but doesn’t say whether the Marvell controller on the motherboard is the root cause, or their own enclosure controller. It looks like it’s the latter.
Now I’m stuck with a 4 TB drive which I can use at max 50 MB/s transfer speed. Unacceptable.
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