Member Avatar for ktsangop

Hello everyone.
I would like to know if there is a factory default configuration for the WD My book world NAS.
I am helping a friend that has one of those in their office and the web interface states that the capacity is 1TB but nowhere in the gui did i find anything about the current raid configuration.

The only option is to change it.
I would like to know if it has 2x1TB disks running raid 1 or 2x500GB disks running raid 0. Nothing found on Western Digital's website or manuals.

Thanks in advance!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by ktsangop

Dani AI

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Short, model-specific clarification and a practical checklist. The My Book World family had several revisions: the single‑disk World Edition and the dual‑drive World Edition II (the “blue rings” dual model) are handled differently at the factory — the dual drive World Edition II ships preformatted as one large spanned/concatenated volume (maximum capacity) and must be reconfigured to RAID 1 or RAID 0 using Drive Management if you want redundancy. (manualshelf.com)

If the web GUI doesn’t show the low‑level layout (as noted), enable root/SSH from the device’s Advanced/Root Access screen and inspect the Linux RAID metadata directly. Typical commands to run after SSHing as root are shown below — they reveal arrays, member devices, and rebuild status:

cat /proc/mdstat
mdadm --detail /dev/md0
mdadm --examine /dev/sda1
lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL
fdisk -l

Enabling SSH and where the UI exposes the root password is in the product manual. Use /proc/mdstat and mdadm to interpret arrays and health. ()

Important cautions and quick recovery notes: changing RAID mode or recreating an array will erase data — always back up before reconfiguring. If a drive fails, RAID‑1 lets you mount the surviving disk on a Linux box; spanned or striped (RAID‑0/span) layouts usually require both disks to recover files. Monitor rebuilds with a repeating check:

watch -n 1 cat /proc/mdstat

Follow the vendor’s replace/rebuild procedure and match drive sizes. For any data‑critical situation, make a bit‑level copy first and proceed cautiously; rebuilding or reformatting without a backup can make recovery much harder. (support-en.wd.com)

Brief takeaway tied to the thread: confirm your exact model, enable SSH to inspect mdadm metadata when the GUI is opaque, and always back up before changing RAID. If you opened the enclosure (as did) the same checks above show which layout you really had and what recovery path to follow.

Member Avatar for mechbas

There are two possible ways to determine how many drives there actually are. The principle is the bios settings which will probably indicate drive size as well, the other is a setting prompt at boot time from a drive support card installed on the system board. If it's not in either then the OS is NOT going to show it in the gui, such as Device Manager. If you can actually get to the gui then you have at least 1 drive installed which should show up as a standard drive in DM under Disk Drives.

Edited by mechbas
Member Avatar for ktsangop

Sorry about the late answer but i had to open the device eventually.
One of the drives was failing now and then, and had to be replaced.

Looks like the default configuration was raid 0 (lame).
Lucky for them i managed to get a full backup of both drives, replaced the faulty one and created a new configuration (raid 1 this time).

Anyway , maybe it wasn't clear enough but there is no way to look at the device's bios (if there is such thing in a NAS).
This is the device
http://support.wdc.com/product/install.asp?groupid=107
And you can only access it by a web interface or ssh.

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