4tb Mybook Cluster Size issue

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rboutin2

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Nov 22, 2015
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I am having a problem with two WD Mybook 4tb Drives. One i harvested the WD green drive from and put it in my desktop, formatted it to NTFS, default cluster 8 (4096).

The other I tried to use minitool's copy disk option to copy from the harvested to another WD mybook 4tb connected via usb 3.0. it told me i cannot copy due to cluster sizes being different. Okay, just change cluster size right? When I set it to 8, after it's done, it says it's at 2 (8192). I cannot get it to match the harvested drive at all. Any suggestions? Is it because one is a SATA drive and the other is using the usb interface built into the enclosure?

In minitool partition wizrd, the drives are currently read as following:

Harvested (SATA) drive: Current cluster size is 8 sectors, 4KB (4096 Bytes)

Enclosure (USB 3.0) drive: Current cluster size is 2 sectors, 8KB (8192 Bytes)
 
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

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Jul 30, 2014
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Welcome to the community, rboutin2!

Unfortunately, when it comes to bigger external drives (above 2 TB), you'd almost always need the external enclosure for the drive to work properly. :( I'm sorry to hear about your WD My Book, but you shouldn't have taken it out of the enclosure as this voids the warranty on the drive. When it comes to this external desktop HDD model, you'd need the enclosure not only because of the 4KB LBAs, but also because of the hardware encryption. Connecting the WD Green from the WD My Book exposes the drive to its native 512e LBAs. No matter how you configure the allocation unit size, you won't be able to change the fact that your SATA ports use native LBAs.
When it comes to bigger external HDDs, you have not only the HDD configured with 4 KB LBAs, but also its original enclosure.
Another reason this might not work is the hardware encryption that I already mentioned. This is for extra protection of your data and it basically makes your data inaccessible without the original enclosure.

Hope I was helpful.
SuperSoph_WD
 
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rboutin2

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Nov 22, 2015
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Is my understanding correct on this then: The harvested drive in my computer is perfectly fine, and that's why the clusters read properly, but the drive still in the enclosure is off because the USB interface board is what is setting how the drive works? Because, i have had ZERO problems with the harvested drive. Its the USB drive thats being difficult. As far as encryption goes, I don't think this model of mybook has it. Its the black usb 3.0 model from walmart.

On a side note, are the green drives inside the enclosures the same thing as a green bare drive, just put into an enclosure?
 
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SuperSoph_WD

SuperSoph_WD

Glorious
Jul 30, 2014
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Hey there again, rboutin2!

I'd recommend you to backup any data from the WD My Book and re-format the HDD to the default allocation unit size. It's definitely not supposed to be 8 KB! Any HDD below 16 TB that is formatted in NTFS should have 4 KB allocation unit size. You should check all your drives using CMD. Here's an article from MS that explains the drive checkup commands: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc788080.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
More specifically, give the fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo X: a try, where X is the drive letter assigned to your external and/or the internal HDD.

Keep me posted. Hope this helps.
SuperSoph_WD
 
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