Water-Damaged WD MyBook Studio Edition II Quad Interface 6TB

Hello, this is my 1st post and the reason why I joined. I have a water-damaged hard drive 6TB that had water on-or-in it for 1 day and then I dried it out. I see no water corrosion damage anywhere on the drive itself or the internal control board in the chassis or housing.

This hard drive would not power up when plugged into a 15" MacBook Pro but it did when plug into a 27" iMac using the same stock AC adapter. The power status with the 27" iMac has the front light blinking but no spinning of the platters.

I read that it could be a problem with the control board in the housing unit and to use a SATA-USB connector straight into the computer which I’ve done to no avail. I’ve tried this 3.3V pin tape-hack explained in Step 14 here -

…and still nothing on both drives. I don’t know what else I can do which is why I’m asking you. Some extra links to the exact model I have with the online manual and attached photos. Any advice is greatly appreciated, thank you.

Online Manual - User manual Western Digital My Book Studio II (English - 36 pages)

https://www.anandtech.com/show/4759/western-digital-my-book-studio-edition-ii-6tb-review



How dry?
Lots of little places for bits of moisture to remain and create a short, which would potentially produce inconsistent behavior on poweron. If it was on when wet, it could be that it was damaged by such a short.

Have you removed the control board and checked both sides for moisture?
How long did you let it dry for? Hours? Days? Weeks?
Did you check inside the ports for any moisture?
Did you disassemble the dock and make sure there’s no lingering moisture?
Was it on when it first got wet?

If a separate adapter doesn’t power the drives on, the drives are what’s not working.
Could also be bad pressure from seal damage maybe?

well I let it sit for awhile so its very very dry, I haven’t removed the PCB yet and check the other inside, I didn’t want to get to that yet if I didn’t need to, and it’s been dry for week now. Ports aren’t wet, but upon closer inspection I see that one of these PCB’s has a darker discoloration on some of the metal mounting points on the PCB. I took side-by-side pics of them here.

So I’m guessing that one of these boards had the water affect it more than the other and maybe has shorted out causing this darker burn-looking discoloration, I don’t know, just speculating.

But since this is RAID 0 then I would have to replace this 1 board and reinstall it back into the original chassis and hope it starts up because I won’t be able to get the to spin individually because of the RAID 0 configuration.

But I may need to replace the BIOS chip if the firmware is different. I don’t know if it is just a clamp or if that chip is soldered because then I would have to bring the old and new PCB to a shop just to do that. Am I correct in any of this perhaps?


Do the drives make any attempt to spin up at all when connected directly to a known-good system?

Once you’re sure the drives are absolutely dry, that’s the next step. Internal SATA power/data cables recommended, but a powered open USB adapter/dock is also an option.

Try this first to verify the function of the drives. If they work, make full image backups to something first and foremost, as you want a “known good” copy of “the data”.
Best of luck recovering the data from a hardware Raid0 configuration, but if you have the data of the drives easily accessible, that’ll greatly increases your odds.
If the drives appear to be okay, and you have a backup of the data, you can recover directly from the drives, or from the disk images, whichever is faster or easier, because… Apparently there’s even software to virtually rebuild a failed WD external raid array. At least, according to the AI generated listicles on duckduckgo there is.
I can’t make any recommendations due to lack of experience with WD external raid0 harddrive failures.

Assuming the drives are dead, then... If the data is worth a few grand to chance a recovery, you should take it to a specialist. If it's not, you probably should just give up on it. But, if you can't stand either of these...

Raid won’t prevent the drives from individually spinning up and being read, you just end up reading every other block from each drive, meaning neither is giving you a readable complete filesystem or recoverable data individually. With the raid controller it’s self in the mix, it may also be lying to the system about where exactly on the disk the data is stored, making it even harder to recover actual data from it. That means that, worst case, you need the raid controller to be working to actually get data off the drives.
It doesn’t look like that should be the case for these? I hope.

If you can get either of these to spin individually, make a backup of the disk image to something, and then back the other up separately, rather than tying to get them to boot together. The difference in read speed could end up with the raid array thinking the drive is dead and not wanting to cooperate, or increase stress on the other drive, and increase the amount of time it needs to be up for, increasing the odds of a cascading failure.

Harddrives often have calibration data baked into the chip, so if you can salvage the chip from the dead drive to put onto the donor board, it might even read at a reasonable speed, but who knows. If not, don’t be surprised if your drive is reading at <1MB/s and you need to leave it for multiple days to get a complete backup.

Rant about bad habits

Raid0 is never how you should store important data. Harddrives can fail in so many ways for so many reasons, from a small shake to the drive from any source, to moisture, corrosion, water, power surges, or just spontaneous internal mechanical failure. Even worse, any kind of raid array will increase the average drive stress by something close to the number of drives in the array, because accessing data from one drive requires accessing all of the drives simultaneously, rather than individually.
Drives don’t wear out while spun down, they wear out while accessing data. The more worn out a drive is, the more likely it is to fail when doing something.

Also, it’s probably a bad idea to trust an external dock that does more than directly present the drives to the system. WD and seagate docks both spontaneously suicide themselves, sometimes taking the drives inside with them. People chalk it up to “well sometimes bad things happen”, but the dock is the biggest point of failure on WD and Seagate external harddrives.

TL:DR I really hope the drives are okay and you can recover your data. If not, I really, really hope that wasn’t important data.

no they make zero attempt at spinning, only the front light comes on and then shuts off, I need the data sure, I think I should wash the PCB with 90% isopropyl alcohol, I’m reading this has worked for some people, or even buying a replacement PCB I’ll still be in good shape in not damaging anything.

The harddrives themselves don’t have any lights. What adapter are you using to plug them in? Can you use internal SATA data or power connections in a desktop PC to rule out the possibility of faulty USB adapters or insufficient power?
If the USB adapter you’re using isn’t externally powered, it may not have the juice to turn the drives on. This is common with cheap adapters which can work fine for SSDs, or sometimes laptop HDDs, but absolutely won’t power on a 3.5" desktop HDD.
Adapters that use two USB ports may work, but also may not, depending on the adapter, USB ports, and drive in question.

It’s really best to try with a known working desktop power and data connection, as you don’t have to worry about power, and you have more diagnostic options, like seeing if the bios recognizes something as plugged in.

the front light on the WD chassis or housing, casing whichever word applies, and I was using that casing that came with the drives as shown in the pics in the links above and those came with their own AC Adapters.

I tried to switch to another regular SATA-USB but like you said those small adapter doesn’t have the juice to spin it up. Plus since I think its RAID 0 I don’t think I can retrieve data from just 1 drive can I?

You should stop using that WD adapter completely.
If it’s not powering on, it could have a short inside the adapter board, and repeatedly trying to power the drives off bad power could kill them very dead. They’re very cheaply made and are far more likely to fail in the event of a short than the PCB on the drive it’s self.
Plugging electronics into dead/bad/shorted power puts the possibly still working electronics at risk. That board delivers power, and is therefore capable of frying your drives if you give it the chance.

If you get an externally powered USB to SATA adapter, that takes power from an AC power source, it can probably spin up the drives just fine. Just make sure it’s one that’s got an AC power adapter, and isn’t dead.
But, again, if you can, plugging it into a desktop PC using regular internal SATA power and data is preferable.

According to THIS WD just uses linux and lvm which, if true, means simply plugging into a linux desktop and pointing it to the drives might be enough to pull your data off. If not, you may need some expensive software that understands what WD has done.
It looks like they even had the same dock, though, so that’s promising.

for your 1st part - do you mean the Ktec AC Adapter that came with the drive or the outside chassis / housing that holds the drives with it’s own PCB’s inside that, which has an adapter attached to the PCB?

for your 2nd part - I was thinking of 2 approaches, just buy another used Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 6TB External Hard Drive just to use the chassis, test it out to verify to works then pull out the empty drives, put in my old ones and see if it works or buy SATA Hot Swap Docking Station for RAID 0 drives and see if that works.

I can’t post a link for some reason? to the docking station I was talking about.

1: Both. You don’t know which is bad, so don’t use either. It’s power, it can kill anything it touches. I would stay away from using either.

2: A docking station is fine, but the drives may not “just work” because the raid configuration may be stored in the old housing. I don’t really know, because I don’t use WD my book external raid drives, or any external USB RAID adapters, but if it’s a small linux nas presenting the drives, it must have storage for linux and LVM, and it probably stores the necessary information in there.

It might still be able to recover the raid configuration automagically, though, so it’s worth a shot. I’ve used a linux LVM before across a reinstall of the OS, but I don’t remember if it “just worked” or if it “worked once you point it to the drives”. It definitely didn’t require any complex or extensive work, though.
But, before that, plug the drives in individually and make a backup of their current state. You don’t want to plug them into a My Book Studio Edition II only for it to detect that there was a change of drives, and “helpfully” wipe the partition information so you can use them as empties.
Recover your data first, even if it’s as a pair of unusable disk images. If the data is important, having a “clean” copy of the drives in their current state is the first step.
I’d recommend just getting a single SATA-USB powered adapter for this step, to be on the safe side.

If you have access to a linux computer or know someone who uses one, they probably know how to make a disk image using dd if=/dev/sda of=~/image. If not, you probably have to find disk imaging software you can use to do that, and some of these programs use weird proprietary formats to try to lock you into their software.

But, before that, plug the drives in individually and make a backup of their current state. - these RAID 0 drives don’t spin so I can’t make a backup of it.

You don’t want to plug them into a My Book Studio Edition II only for it to detect that there was a change of drives, and “helpfully” wipe the partition information so you can use them as empties. - Jesus, would this happen, has this happened before, or heard of?

Linux is too complicated for me to use and get into, I’ve tried using many Distros in the past and its just not easy and fluid enough to work with. After 2 decades, I wished that someone had come up with a super easy Distro like and OSX but all the ones that claim they are OSX-like are not, just in “some” graphics only.

1: That’s why you need to plug them into something that can make them spin, individually,
If neither drive spins, when plugged into a PC or externally powered USB adapter that isn’t your dead WD My Book, the drives are dead, and that’s game over for your data.

2: Because we don’t know it won’t happen, we don’t tempt fate by giving it a chance to happen. It’s within reason though.

3: It might seem complicated, but it’s just different from what you’re used to. For my part, I find android or MacOS or the like to be confusing, unintuitive, and difficult.
For backing up the drive, there’s lots of tutorials on how to use dd from a liveimage. It’s a bit intimidating, but there’s nothing difficult about it. But the first step is getting your drives to spin.

If linux is difficult for you, though, that probably means soldering is off the table too, right? If that’s the case, recovering data using a board swap or the like is out of your reach, and if you really need that data, you’ll need to take it to a real specialist.

If I bought a SATA Hot-Swap Docking Station (if they come set up for RAID 0 drives, I don’t know?) would the drives sync up and work or would they not because the RAID configuration may be stored in the PCB of the old housing - the WD MyBook Studio Edition II housing that it came with?

Also if I bought a new-used My Book Studio Edition II only to use the housing and pull out the new drives and replace them with my old drives…

I was told that I don’t want to install them into another My Book Studio Edition II chassis only for the new housing PCB to detect that there was a change of drives and that new housing PCB will “helpfully” wipe the partition information so I can use them as empties, loosing all of my data.

Would either or both of these 2 statements be true? Anyone have any experience with these particular RAID 0 setup WD Green Caviar drives?

RAID0 (and all other forms of RAID) is an extrernal process applied to a number of perfectly ordinary drives. There’s no set standard, storage format, etc. WD implemented it in one way for that enclosure, you’re very unlikely to find another piece of hardware that does the same thing the same way. Resurrecting your data would be best done through a non-damaged enclosure of the exact same type.

Having said that, you first need to make sure your drives are OK. Get an external SATA docking station, insert one of your drives, boot your computer. If the disk spins and it’s recognized in Disk Management, Disks, or Disk Utility (not sure what OS) you can check the other. (Do not let your OS write anything to the disks: Windows will prompt you to write a signature, Mac OS will ask to initialize; deny these.)

If both of your drives are OK, you should make a raw backup of them, then try them in a newly acquired WD enclosure of the exact same type. (Same manufacturer’s part number.)

If the drives aren’t OK, you can try getting a couple of used ones from ebay (again, exact same manufacturer’s part number) and swapping the PCBs. This is pretty easy to do, you’re not risking further damage to the drives.

If a PCB swap doesn’t resurrect them, you’re out of DIY options and your best bet is to contact a professional data recovery service. They are very expensive though.

I’d like to reitterate that, when you plug the drives in to check if they work, you should make a backup of the drives, block for block, before trying to recover anything on them directly. IF another raid enclosure does destroy your data, you can block for block copy that data back to the drive, or another drive, and try a different method.

Having two copies of your data is vastly preferable, especially when performing potentially destructive recovery attempts. If the drive plugs in and is recognized, a bootable linux disk absolutely can perform a full block transfer with sudo dd if=/dev/*source drive* of=/*target file path* bs=4M status=progress via terminal, where *source drive* is the drive you’re copying from, and *target file path* is the file you’re copying to.
if=input file, of=output file. To copy back to the drive in case things go poorly, you reverse it so that if=target file path and of=source drive.
The block for block backup DD does copies every block on the drive, including boot sectors, filesystem information, data, and anything else the software needs to interact with the drive, so you can even make a copy of the file and use that in software to try to recover your data if possible. It’s a virtual copy of the entire readable and writable drive.

Also, for precaution sake, if you need to format the drive you’re going to put the backup file on, do that before plugging in the drive you’re backing up. It would be terrible to accidently format and initialize the wrong drive.

You don’t want to risk losing your data by botching a recovery with no backup.

I just bought a 2011 period-correct enclosure but its a 4TB RAID 0 and mine is a 6TB RAID 0 so I don’t know if the lower drive size matters or not? The manufacturer’s part number differs only with one digit that says its a 2 or 4 or 6 to show the drives size in - WDH2Q40000N or WDH2Q60000N.

But I was thinking of what you were saying - swap the PCB’s from the new drives and put them onto my old drives and put my old drives into the new enclosure and that RAID Controller STILL correspond with those particular PCB’s now mounted on the old drives to recognize them and not overwrite them, I hope?

I’m using an iMac so I will deny any prompt for Time Backup or Initializing when I plug the enclosure into the iMac.

But do you think its better or more riskier to put the drives into an aftermarket generic RAID enclosure before using the sister WD enclosure? I’m reading reviews on Amazon and Walmart that some of these generic RAID systems are overwriting users data when they attempt the same thing that I’m trying to do.

Instead of using a generic raid system, or ANY raid system at all, connect the drives one at a time individually.
If the drives don’t spin individually, RAID is not the problem. The drives should spin up and your mac will ask to initialize them, but as long as you make sure to never ever do anything it asks you to, and instead immediately make a one to one copy of the entire disk instead, you can create a backup of that disk. Repeat for the other, and you can recover safely without risking your data.
If you don’t have a copy of the data on the disk, any recovery attempt is risky.

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Wait, do the things in order. :slight_smile:

First you need to make sure the drives spin, and you need to do this outside the WD enclosure. And you need to back up their raw contents. You absolutely must do this before you try anything in the WD.

Get an external SATA adpater. Something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0759567JT/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Plug one of your RAID-0 drives in. Then do the other one. If they both spin, you can make a raw backup; this is not your readable data yet, it just ensures that we can restart from this same step no matter what happens later.

If both of your drives spin while plugged in, this is how you make a backup:

  1. Get a large hard drive, larger than the two you have put together. Since you had a 6TB WD thing, I’m assuming the disks inside are 3TB each? So get an 8TB drive (6 may or may not be enough), something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-Internal-Drive-3-5-Inch/dp/B07H289S7C/ref=sr_1_2?crid=316D8IIYCZLWW&keywords=8tb+hard+drive&qid=1707142173&sprefix=8tb+har%2Caps%2C114&sr=8-2&ufe=app_do%3Aamzn1.fos.18ed3cb5-28d5-4975-8bc7-93deae8f9840

  1. Format this disk in Mac OS. If you got that enclosure I linked, you can have both this backup drive and one of your bad drives in at the same time and that’s what we need, but at this step (to prevent any misclicks) just have the new, large disk in. Format it.

  2. Now plug in one of the drives that we want to rescue. When it spins up, open Terminal, and type diskutil list. This should list 3 drives: your OS disk, the backup disk we just formatted, and finally the disk we want to rescue. This disk will be somewhere in the list, but you’ll know which one it is because it will say stuff like 3 tb and Unknown. Look at the third column under identifier, it will say something like disk1 or disk2, etc. Note this.

  3. Type cd and drag the backup disk’s icon from the desktop onto terminal. Hit Enter. This will put you in the root of the big disk.

  4. Now type sudo dd if=/dev/diskX of=./disk-a.raw bs=1M status=progress. You must replace diskX with the ID we got from diskutil in the previous step! Hit Enter, type your password, hit Enter again, and go do something else, because this will take a while. (If you look at the output from dd, you can do some math to figure out how long it will take to copy 3 terabytes.)

  5. When you come back and dd has finished, hopefully there will be no errors printed. You can eject the disk you just backed up. Get a sharpie, and draw a big A on this disk somewhere. Go ahead and dock the other one from your WD box with your computer. (While you have the sharpie out you might as well draw a B on this.)

  6. Type diskutill list again to get the ID (it may or may not be the same diskX) and repeat sudo dd if=/dev/diskX of=./disk-b.raw bs=1M status=progress Again, replace diskX with the ID, and note that we’re using disk-b.raw as the output file because this is the B disk and we want it to go to a new file.

When this is done, check the backup disk in Finder (or just type ls -l -h. It should have two files, disk1.raw and disk2.raw. Both should be about 3 terabytes in size. If that is the case, you can breathe, because your data is very likely safe and recoverable.

I don’t know what kind of data we’re talking about (and I don’t care) but if it’s super valuable, like your crypto wallet with 10 BTC in it, I’d get another external drive and copy those .raw files onto that as well just to be super safe.

When this is done, you can put the A and B drives into the new WD you got and see if you get your data back. It would help if you got the exact same model (6TB) but if I had to bet one way or the other, the 4TB one should work as well.

Please, please note that all of the above assumes that the drives are functional! If one or both don’t spin up when plugged into the external SATA bay, then it’s pucker time, probably a PCB swap is in order. (If one of them spins, you can make a backup of that, then put its PCB on the bad drive and see if it wakes up. If both are dead, head to ebay, and you MUST get the exact same drive this time, to hopefully score a good PCB.) We’ll walk you through that too but first steps first: external docking bay, see if the drives work, make a raw backup if they do.

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all good advice, I greatly appreciate all that, those step-by-step instructions will be much needed and helpful :+1: and I wish I had 10 BTC but I don’t even have a crypto wallet lol

I was told that using an aftermarket RAID enclosure puts risk to the drives being overwritten by the generic RAID controller inside the enclosure and to buy 2 of these SATA/IDE to USB Adapters -

amazon dotcom EYOOLD-USB-Converter-Adapter-Optical/dp/B073SB3PD4 -

and use DMDE to sync or stitch up both drives in a newly-created virtual RAID 0 but then I thought wouldn’t it be better to just buy the RAID 0 enclosure box instead like you sent me above until I was told about the generic RAID Controller?

I don’t know if they are the same approach just using different equipment? Does those adapters “not” have any controller because they are separate cables? maybe that presents zero risk to any controller trying to overwrite the data? I don’t know.

And what do you think of some of these amateur-use non-pro softwares on the market -
Disk Drill - cleverfiles dotcom
DMDE - dmde dotcom
ReclaiMe - freeraidrecovery dotcom

Using a GUI would make things easier than going through Terminal but I don’t want to introduce another variable with a 3rd-party software automatically writing to the disk without warning or prompt or something. And if I re-construct a RAID 0 to access my files, how would I know if that new RAID array won’t zap my data?

(I can’t put links into my message for some reason when I could have before and you just did)

It doesn’t matter what SATA adapter you buy. The one I linked to you is more elegant (and more expensive) than 2 of those… things. :slight_smile: My link was for a SATA dock, it’s not a RAID 0 bay, it just has room for connecting 2 disks at once.

I don’t know any of the software listed, and they may or may not work. We can play with them later.

The first thing is to make sure the two drives you pulled from the WD enclosure work. Then immediately after that, you need to make a raw copy of both to protect against potential data loss during the later steps. This was all my write-up covered - just making sure the disks work, and saving their raw contents so it’s safe to experiment with recovery later.