2 TB WD "unreadable" (ticking)

Buy something other than a WD MyBook for backup.

If you have an open drive bay inside, use that.

But I would use CCC or SuperDuper as primary of all your drive volumes, and TimeMachine as data backup.

You can also have and start a new TimeMachine backup that you run only weekly, you'll need to change destination, may need to use a utility to better manage TimeMachine sets.

Disk Warrior use to be essential and had its place, after you account for redundant backup sets.

SoftRAID costs $149 but checks drive sectors for errors during idle time and useful even when not using its RAID features.

Green drives are great when home entertainment, storing video and MP3, where being quiet and low heat or noise and no fan. And they are cheaper.

Due to floods the cost of an $89 1TB WD Black went up in Sept thru now by $100 and even more for WD Black 2TB model.

Good place to shop for externals I thnk is www.macsales.com/firefire

I'm more in favor of OWC Mercury cases and if possible SATA only if possible.

DW is really easy to use. It repairs indexes, but for the most part it is not a recovery tool, but a repair tool. Before running DW you must have available space to copy the data off to. More times than I can count I have heard from users that DW only made the data available to copy and could not actually repair the file structure in place. So make sure you have space elsewhere for the data, just in case.

When you buy DW have them send the CD. You need a CD to be able to boot to it and possibly repair a boot drive. You can burn your own as well. If you order the CD you can still download DW at the time of purchase to run on your MyBook.

Been a while since I used DW - it has absolutely no purpose if you have good backups. No reason to repair a drive and wonder if it is still sub par when you can erase and test a drive and then make a clean copy over from backups. Cannot stress enough how important it is to plan your backups. Do it on paper so you know it is complete.Especially for someone like you who has such a complex network. Point being though, DW is not useful in your tool box if you maintain good backups.

WHen you run DW just point it at the problem drive and let it do its thing. A lot of damage can take a long time to fix. It will ask you how you want to proceed before it makes any changes though.

Using a zero to test drives is not only a good way to make sure a drive with a problem is not going to fail right after you put your data back on it, but is a great way to do a minimal test of a new drive before putting it into production. I wrote a little guide about it that describes the procedure. Easy to do and in a couple hours will hammer hard enough to make sure not only the drive but the connection hardware and bus are working correctly. I zero every drive, enclosure or new bridge or RAID as the first step in testing.

All external ejectable drives show as orange. The blue/green disk icon is for a Time Machine drive. Apple designates these colors through Disk Utility - you can't really count on them to be right all the time. But usually and orange icon will also have an eject button next to it in a finder window.

You will need another drive. And from there you can recover your data at your liesure using DW. Sounds like a plan.

I usually advise that any Time Machine drive be erased and started over on a regular basis. They tend to get more complex every day and eventually get corrupted. By erasing and starting over every few months Time Machine works pretty good and you get around that weakness.

Rick