WD My Book Duo Formatting Question

[justicephoto]

I've been using the My Book Duo to archive old photos. I was hoping that I could take the full drives out of it and then use a SATA drive reader to read an individual drive when I needed to access archived images.

It looks like, because of how Western Digital's shell formatted the files, the SATA reader does't recognize the drives. I emailed them and they said it's written in Linux OS, and that the only way you can read the drives again is to put them back in the WD shell.

Is there a way around this? Are there other drive enclosures I can buy in the future which will allow me to use my own drives and won't format them in some wonky format that won't allow me to access the drives with a drive reader?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, justicephoto.

Basically you should be able to use them either as external (via a different enclosure or a docking station) or as internal drives even now. But as my colleagues from the customer support have mentioned, you'd have to backup the data before that and reformat the HDD/s.

If you decide to get a generic external enclosure and you reformat the drives, I assume that you won't need to reformat them whenever you decide to take them out of the said enclosure anymore. However with NAS enclosures this is pretty common, even if it has been set in a RAID 1 configuration.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
Boogieman_WD