4TB Western Digital My Book 1230 USB hard drive not working on 10.2

[Paul Mather]

On Aug 3, 2015, at 11:09 AM, Alban Hertroys <haramrae at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3 August 2015 at 15:01, Paul Mather <freebsd-lists at gromit.dlib.vt.edu> wrote:
>> On Aug 2, 2015, at 9:34 PM, Adam McDougall <mcdouga9 at egr.msu.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 08/02/2015 21:22, Paul Mather wrote:
>>>> I have a 4TB external USB drive (Western Digital My Book 1230) that I am trying to use under FreeBSD/amd64 10.2 (10.2-PRERELEASE #0 r286052: Wed Jul 29 20:59:39 EDT 2015).  This system has a MSI 760GMA-P34 (FX) motherboard.
>>>> 
>>>> The drive probes unreliably when plugged in to a USB 3 port.  It reliably probes when plugged into a USB 2 port.  However, it works in neither cases.  Attempting to dd from the drive results in a "dd: /dev/da0: Invalid argument".
> 
> FYI: I had been experiencing the same with a 2 TB WD MyBook on OS X
> (Mavericks). The drive was being used for Time Machine backups, but it
> would at irregular intervals it would just 'disconnect' itself. My
> guess is that there's a firmware problem in the USB3 chip in those
> drives.
> 
> After trying to get the issue fixed for almost half a year I returned
> it and replaced it by a Seagate, which has been working flawlessly
> ever since.
> 
> I'm just saying, perhaps the problem isn't with FreeBSD but with the drive.


I'd love just to get to the "randomly disconnects" stage under FreeBSD at this point. :-)

Up to now, I have been unable to read ANY data off the drive under FreeBSD, either via USB 2 or USB 3. :-(

However, you have given me something to think about: does anyone know of a 4 TB USB 2 or 3 drive that will work reliably under FreeBSD 10-STABLE right now?

Cheers,

Paul.