What the WD RAID Manager flashing icons mean on a Mac computer?
When you connect a WD external drive to your Mac computer, and you have the WD Drive Manager installed on it, a little blue WD icon appears in the upper right corner of your desktop. Depending on the status of your drive, or dual RAID drive, the WD icon will do different things.
- The WD icon is also the way that you access the drive’s status, or as in this case, the drive’s RAID status. When the RAID is healthy, you will see the blue WD icon. Clicking on the WD icon opens a short menu that leads to launching the RAID Manager. From there, you can reconfigure the RAID mode of the drive.
- If something happens to the RAID status of the drive, a warning will be issued.
For RAID 1 (Mirrored)
- The WD logo will flash to dark blue, if it’s a degraded RAID 1.
- When you click on the WD icon, a menu opens up showing the WD My Book RAID USB. When you rollover it, another menu pops up giving the status of the drive. In this case, it shows RAID Status: Degraded. Now click on Launch WD RAID Manager.
- When you click on Launch WD RAID Manager, a Drive Configurations window opens up showing what has happen. In this case, a drive has failed and needs to be replaced.
- You will notice in Drive Configurations that you still show a capacity. This is because the drive was part of a RAID 1 configuration, and the data is still available. Once the drive is replaced the data will be rewritten to the new drive.
For RAID 0 (Striped)
- Again, a warning would be issued, if the drive’s RAID status was having problems. In this case, the flashing red means that you are having a problem with your RAID 0 configuration being degraded.
- This time, you would see a red bullet in front of WD My Book RAID USB instead of a yellow bullet, as is found when a RAID 1 Drive has degraded. And in the menu on the left, you would also see RAID Status: Config Problem.
- Clicking on Launch WD RAID Manager opens the Drive Configurations window. This time, however, you would see a 0 under Capacity. That’s because when one of the drives fails while in RAID 0 mode, as it did in this case, you immediately lose all the data. You would need to go to a data recovery company to possibly regain the lost data, if you didn’t have the data saved on another drive.
