I bought a Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II external hard drive recently. This is a 1TB external drive. It wasn’t cheap.
It was delivered last Friday and I went about installing it on Saturday.
It doesn’t work.
The lights come on when it is powered up but it doesn’t appear on the computer’s desktop, nor does it appear in the RAID Manager software which ships with the product (or in my Mac’s Disk Utility program).
It doesn’t seem to matter whether I try to connect using USB or Firewire - I get the same results. Swapping the cables which came with it for USB and Firewire cables which I already own make no difference either. My old La Cie external has no problem showing up.
The support documentation which comes with it doesn’t list any contact details for Ireland and the Support site has no useful info on this drive.
And it is Monday.
Not happy.
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I feel your pain, Tom. I had an equally unsatisfying experience with the Netgear SC101.
http://blog.forret.com/2006/07/netgear-sc-101-urgent-support-required/
One day I’d like to hear from someone that has a 1TB RAID solution, who is actually happy with it.
A couple of years ago I bought a 80GB WD hard drive (this was 2001).
It stopped working within a year.
I would never buy a Western Digital product again.
Ah Walter,
don’t be telling me that now!!!
Seems like you got a faulty one Tom, to state the obvious.. Seems a shame though that you would get such a bad experience with the first one. I have bought one for home and 4 for work and haven’t had problems with any of them..
Again to Walter i would say that perhaps that Westeren Digital have improved? But that would be foolish to say on a comment on a blog post like this.
Just out of interest, where did you buy it Tom?
Yeah,
Sorry Tom,
I just found this post on my old blog (the one nobody read)…
http://www.xanadb.com/archive/hardware/20030122
…trouble is I never bothered to blog it when the hard drive broke.
Sean, I bought it from Komplett - I have an RMA request in with them but so far have heard nothing back - hmmmm.
Walter - I used to read your old blog!
You’ll be kept waiting on that RMA request if past word of mouth is anything to go by. Quick delivery is one thing but returns seem a little tricky.
Its hardly down to the fact that its a 1TB as opposed to something a bit smaller (like a 250gb)?
Hi Tom,
I suppose it’s too late to say this now, but I also had Western Digital hard drives pack up on me (2 180gb disks). Promised myself it would be maxtor all the way from now one and touch wood no problems.
Look on the bright side, at least you did not load your life’s work into it, only to have it disappear.
Most computing equipment dies in the first few weeks of operation, or just after the warrantee runs out. Think of the time you have saved.
when you get into these dual disk systems, the likelihood of failure doubles. Honestly, at this point, you need to start thinking about managed storage systems, some sort of RAID5. Not cheap, but if it’s what you need …
I absolutely hate Western Digital hard drives. In the last six years I have had a 6, a ~17, a 30, a 60, an 80, an 80, a 120, and a 160GB IDE drive fail, not to mention two portable 2.5″ 60 GB Passport drives. These were drives just for personal use! In all cases except one they failed within months of the warranty expiring. And in that one instance where failure occurred before expiration of the warranty, I was sent a dud replacement drive. But because I received the replacement after the warranty expired, I had no recourse for replacement. And WD drives all failed the same way, with that characteristic Western Digital kerchunking sound. The only other drive I have ever had not work are DOA eBay purchases and a Seagate 20MB MFM/RLL drive from two decades ago. Every other drive I’ve ever had has been gracefully retired after a long career of dutiful service.
I just bought the 1TB Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II external hard drive and had the problem (would not show up on My Computer) on my Windows XP system. After a little digging on the Western Digital site, I found the following obscure note (see http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=207&p):
Important: The My Book Pro Edition II hard drive ships with a HPS+ (Journaled) format. This Macintosh native format is not compatible with Windows based computers therefore the drive will need to be repartitioned and reformatted before usage in a Windows based computer.”
After reformatting the drive every thing worked fine. Unfortunately, the drive is exceedingly noisy … not someting I like for a home studio. I will likely return it.
Hope this helps.
did you know the product is unformatted ?
try to format the hard drive by right click on my computer, go to manage. on the left section double click on storage then from the right section double click on disk management(local)
from then you will see all you hard drive, formatted and unformatted.
then format the external you just installed
good luck
I have had similar issues; not with device failure, but compatibility with particular USB chipsets.
The Western Digital My Book Pro II has an internal raid controller, which uses a specific WD driver. You need this driver working before you can see the hard disk devices.
On some USB controllers, however, the DEVICE ID reported by the Raid controller is incompatible with the raid controller driver, and so the raid manager software never sees the device.
After many emails with support, they refused to debug the issue, because no one else had ever reported a compatibility issue, and my device was would work properly on one of three systems that I tried it on.
Something tells me that the next person who calls will also be told that no one has ever reported a compatibility issue, too.
Segate offers an external 750 GB disk at about 2/3 the price of the 1TB WD Pro II, and it does not use any special drivers; it worked fine on all of my computers, and comes with a 5 year warranty, instead of a 1 year warranty.
Just my two bits.
jk
We bought a Western Digital “My Book” to backup files and it died after ten days.
It keeps making a clicking sound and the hard drive is SHOT.
In this day and age to have a product fail so often for so many people as I read ALL the “Western Digital My Book Sucks” posts around the interenet, I must say it’s a piece of garbage. If your drive has not failed yet, DO NOT USE IT FOR CRITICAL DATA.
Hi all,
I bought two of these from Komplett before Christmas and the first one I plugged into my laptop wasnt recognised so I searched and found this site.
I unpacked the second one and it’s working fine, the first must have been a dud.
Doesnt look good tbh!
Bought a WD My Book 320 GB. It died after 1 hour… when i unplugged it It just died.. wont start again.
I bought two “WD My Book 320 GBs” there before X-mas. One for me and one as a gift. One failed within 10 minutes: some clicking for a bit then nothing. Dead as a door nail. I made sure the second one was working before giving it to someone as a Christmas present. Of course it packed in one hour after he started using it. That’s not the worst of it. I bought from pixmania; After reading some of the reviews of their customer service, it looks like I’m in for a rough ride.
Try using the firewire 400 connection instead - worked like a charm!
Works for me, I have been running it for about two months, very pleased with it, running over FireWire. Only thing I cant install the firmware update for the fans… need a PC for that and I’m on Mac.
Have had WD My Book 250GB for less than a week. Now it wont start. Great
I have a 1TB model running on a mac book pro, i was able to see it and was also able to run the firmware update which made it much quieter but every time i try to set it up in a RAID 1 configuration using the WD software, it disconnects itself during the process and I get the “Device Removal” error message and then the whole process craps out. I can format it with Disk Utility but only in the full 1TB configurations, not in the 500gig RAID 1 config. Anyone else having this problem or know any solutions?
I just bought the 1 TB model from WD to use it as a secured (RAID1) “media server” storage unit (used at home for linux, windows and mac) with our national ISP quadriple play Freebox HD unit. After having spent hours to find the good solution to format with FAT32 (500 GB…). I finally found the solution with http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm in 6 seconds it was done ! the dshc). The WD unit works perfectly with USB, firewire, with pc and mac. But It does not work with the Freebox unit (USB) for probably the same reason than Jeffrey Knodel experienced (I found on the web that I am not alone). By the way the unit is nice but very noisy (when writing) especially in the living room ! So for these 2 reasons I will return it.
I bought a WD My Book 250 GB Premium Edition Dual Interface (FireWire 800 and 400 + USB 2.0).
It has worked for 4 months, with some starting issues from time to time (not coming up in Finder, has to unplug all cables, reconnect and try again, then it would work).
As from yesterday it won’t start at all. I have tried disconnecting cables, holding the button down for 60 seconds, I tried USB instead of FireWire, no luck at all.
I will never, ever ever ever buy WD again. Sure it’s nice with the blue light on the front but WHERE ARE MY PHOTOS!?!
I’m using a MacBook core 2 duo.
Does anyone know if the WD Mybook pro can be used under RedHat WS 4?
We have used the 500GB by reformatting them as ext3 without a problem, but since the 1TB is really 2 drives I am thinking it woun’t be picked up properly in Linux without a driver.
Well, you lot have just saved me wasting £300 quid of my money, thanks for that, but any ideas on reilable external harddrives.
Just unpacked a WD MyBook 500GB and plugged it into my WinXP Laptop. A funny dialogue apeared about new hardware beeing detected, search for driver and so on. Well, it didn’t find a driver and no drive showed up in Volume Manager. Fire up google, and what do I find? This site! Now I’m thinking what an idiot I must have been not to search google *before* purchasing this stuff…
Gotta try this at home again, but for the moment it seams like this drive is just dead on arrival. The drive of my friend who bought it on the same day seems to works fine (well, for about a week now ;)…
OK, bought the 1TB MyBook Pro II from the Apple Store and it had the wrong power cord (the one that connects to the power brick and the wall outlet) packed in the box. I was able to find the correct cord in my own stash of cables and powered it up on my 24″ iMac and my 17″ MacBook Pro. NOTHING! I exchanged it at the Apple Store and found the same wrong power cable in that box too. Hook it up to both computers and again…NOTHING. I’ve tried everything to get it to be recognized to no avail. I’m going to return it and try another brand.
I’ve been using the 500GB MyBook for about 6 months and would like to get one of the 1TB models to use for RAID1. I am a storage admin by trade and the 500GB MyBook is the nicest external drive I have ever used. I also have a Netgear SC101 NAS with a couple 250GB IDE drives in it and the performance has been disappointing to say the least.
OK, so I have a WD MyBook Essential 160 gb, and it has run without real complaint for 18 (?) months. Today it wont power up. All connections are in order. When presented with wall power the light blinks for 1/2 second and then nothing. Short and sweet answers if you know them please, because I have “put my life on it” like they said to do, and now I am gutted. Is there a solution other than paying thousands of dollars to have it opened in a clean room and have the motors replaced or something like that? I just want the 10 years of digital photos, tax returns, 60 gb music, etc. And then on to rethink the digital life. Vinyl albums never looked so good right now…
I just a 500 Gb external WD harddrive. I started copying files from my other harddrive to have as a backup. It stopped, and windows wouldn’t react. It hung for a couple of hours, before i had to pull the plug. When i restarted, windows xp couldn’t find the harddrive, nor my laptop, which is also running xp. Good thing i still have my backup on another harddrive. Very dissapointing.
Umm its a hard drive. Did you partition it ?
I have the same device and all the symptoms you give seem from the eyes of someone who doesn’t know about FDISK or Windows Admin Tools.
Don’t blame the drive blame yourself.
Thanks for the comment Joshua - as it happens I know quite a lot about them but as I was connecting this device to my Mac they weren’t relevant.
On the Mac you would use Disk Utility to partition drives. My copy of Disk Utility has no problem seeing my other devices and partitioning them. Only this device.
I’m blaming the device.
I don’t want to be rude, but i think i know what how to work my way around the computer. It failed to write zero’s in the wd utility program, and all the other utilities available in windows. When i write that it failed, it did fail. You don’t think it’s possible to produce a faulty hard drive. Please don’t be such a WD “lover”. And don’t try to make me like fool Tom Raftery! Sincerely Zuprmario
Have been reading all the comments with great interest & I just wanted to let everyone know that I bought the MyBook pro 500gb this week, it arrived Monday & by Thursday it not only lost all my Data, which I’ve been unable to retrieve, it has also damaged my Firewire800 connection on my G5!
After contacting WD support they told me that they where unable to offer any support or advice for Mac’s, which I found odd as there is an Illustration on the packaging that show’s a G5 setup with a lovely line of Mybooks, they also said to me that it was important to have a sense of humour in these circumstances!
Unfortunately not only have I now got to spend money getting my G5 fixed I’ve also have to replace my phone after I slammed the other one down!!
My advice would be to stay well away from them!
Actually I was hoping that someone might be kind enough to offer some advice as I’m a little bit stumped on what to go for next. The Guys I have my apple care with have suggested a Lacie but I’ve read such terrible reviews of them & likewise with a Maxtor. I’m only looking to go up to about 500gb so if anyone could offer any advice I would be eternally grateful.
Many Thanks
Jason
did anyone find a solution??? I just bought a 500gb premium and it doesn’t show up in my computer, instead it just keeps asking for drivers (usb)!!! I’m really pissed off… please let me know if you find any solution
p.s.: I’m starting to believe that this is the drive’s fault… Even my linux system doesn’t recognizes it (and it never had any problems recognizing usb storage before)…
I have been reading for years how WD drives have inproved and they don’t fail like they use to so I bought a WD MyBook 250GB. PLugged it in..ok…deleted the Fat32 and and installed NTFS and partioned the drive and all looked good. Started tranferring data…still looking good…moved about 100GB and still all looking good. Then the my wall came crumbling down. Errors.errors everywhere and not a WD techie to be found. This drive failed within its first 2 hours of life. Looks like my views of Western Digital will go back to thinking they are all crap again.
Ok, this must be the most stupid bug ever! After i lost 3-4 hours trying to find where the h#ll are the drivers it’s asking and after trying various stupid things like changing the cable, the port, the orientation of the disk (!) i finally tried one last thing that i thought it was wrong: plug-in the power cable AFTER connecting the drive to the pc. And it worked! :S
This must be the most frustrating bug i’ve ever seen (after 10 years messing up with computers)… Shame for WD! And after reading all these bad reviews and stories about lost data and stuff i’m thinking that next time i buy something this important i’ll google for “x product problem” first!
Hope everything works fine from now on…
Hi
I also have big problems with my WD My book II (1 TB) and it happened after about 6 weeks of use (AND I have my whole life in it) - that is 420 GB of pictures, videos and EVERYTHING.
Now it doesn’t show up on my computer at all (Firewire or USB). Tried on two different computer with same depressing result.
I haven’t had time to investigate before now, but what I am looking for feedback on is this:
1. Error situation
a. The error happened after connecting with 6 pin firewire (and I smelled a burning smell of some kind). Only dust or sircuits burning - I don’t know.
Then the WD didn’t come up on firewire at all. I tried it on USB - then the disc showed up OK.
Then tried a firmwire upgrade (but this failed), in fact the “upgrade” button never came up.
After this the USB connection didn’t work either.
2. Possible to get to the discs?
Any one know if it is possible to get to the disc data directly by opening the My book and hook the discs up by SCSI or IDE?)
My important issues is firstly saving the data - than bugging the supplier (Komplett in Norway).
Best regards
Geir B
Bought a 250 GB WD Mybook just after Christmas. Worked fine for a couple of weeks but on the weekend, it started making a clicking sound and now it doesn’t show up on my laptop anymore. Anyone got any advice about contacting WD about replacements etc.?
Format it rookie!
You probably are running Windows 95 also.
I have a piece of shit WD My Book 500 GB that I bought at Costco a month ago. I bought it to replace a smaller drive and moved everything to the WD POS. Because the other drive wasn’t needed anymore I formated it and gave it to a friend. Last night the fucker took a big fucking shit on me and I lost everything. I tried to go through WD to see if there was something that I can do. They still haven’t gotten back to me. Their solution is to get a fucking drive restoration company to restore my data at my expense of course. I FUCKING HATE WESTERN DIGITAL. I tell you that if I ever met a person that works for WD on their design team I would kick the living shit out of them.
Thats what I think how about you.
Neo
I recently purchased a WD My Book Pro Edition II, 1 Terabite external drive. Having read comments on this web site I was ready for the possible problems I might have encountered. My unit came with an additional document included by Western Digital explaining that the My Book was formatted for Mac. I had no problem reformatting the drive for Windows XP, except a 1 terabite drive does take a good while to format. The drive was recognized instantly by my operating system and file copying was lightening fast in RAID 0. What was a total surprise was how excessively loud the cooling fan really is. When the fan first turned on after about a half hour of “ON” time, and while formatting, I was impressed with the fans quiet hum. Then after about another 15 minutes the fan went into HIGH speed. I did not know it had a high speed. Then the roar of a blow drier came shouting out of my computer room. I had left the room while the drive was formatting. I rushed back in the room thinking a drive had lost a bearing or something. What a noise. WD simply has to redesign the cooling for this unit. First of all, the fan is blocked from properly venting into the unit. The fans output blows against some small holes in the internal metal enclosure. Most of the force is bounced back into the blades. Second, the fan needs to be larger with higher volume but lower RPMs. Also, a bloggers recommendation to flip the fan over to blow out, not in, is wrong! The convection pattern of this unit when sitting UP dictates that the fan blow IN only. Also, the convection only works when the unit is sitting UP in the tall orientation. Don’t lay the thing on its side. Also the way it sits UP is important. One end has holes in the metal case inside. The other end has no holes. You must look inside the case to tell which way is UP. Also, I put little rubber bumpers on the bottom to keep the unit raised slightly off the shelf so some additional convection might occure around the outside of the metal interior enclosure. It’s a great concept, this external RAID drive for home PCs. Just needs some fine tuning. Also, no one mentioned the PRO edition has the superior enterprise drives inside, the Premium edition has the consumer drives. This explains the difference in the warranties. One year for Premium, three year for Pro Edition
An other stupid bug.
I bough two WD MyBook Premium 500 Gb. One to store important data and the other to keep a backup of it.
Unfortunately, although each unit works very well separately, it is not possible to connect, in FireWire mode, the two units at the same time on the same computer. So impossible to make the backup.
It appears that the problem is caused by the identification number which is the same one on the two units: 40718836345943965 (and, probably, on all the units of this model). A computer cannot accept two units carrying the same number, as it cannot accept two files carrying the same name.
The WD support service told me that they were aware of this problem and working to solve it.
But after a month of waiting, they don’t have solution yet and suggest to return the drives.
I would have believe that a serious company like Western Digital could be able to correct such an error more quickly.
Perhaps would somebody be more ingenious?
I have bought a 500gb my book 3 days and have already had major issues with it. For some reason after 30minutes of having it plugged in it just failed to show on my system. I subsequently reaslied that any mass storage device I attached to my PC wouldn’t show including USB drives. After 2 days of messing around with Windows Vista I finally realised that my USB stack was shot. I have subsequently resinstalled windows as a restore would not fix the problem.
I have now plugged the drive into another PC and reaslised that it has lost all my work. I am not too sure about this drive let alone put anything on it. It is going back or I am sticking it on ebay.
Also, in formatting it I seem to have lost the Western Digital backup utility. Does anyone know where I can download it? It is not available on their website. I have contacted tech support via email and am still waiting. Any help will be appreciated.
D
Just bought two WD Mybook 1TB Drives…… Neither one works…. I have spent hours trying to get them to work…. Does not show up in Fdisk. Does not show up in PCW…. Does not show up in BIOS….. Tried on 4 different computers with different chip sets. Tried USB and Firewire…. I spent hours on the phone with Tech Support… These drives are WORTHLESS….. They also had the wrong power cord… Took me hours to tell them…. Don’t buy Western Digital drives…… I am now going to try the Lacie 1TB drives….
Bought a Mybook Premium (from newegg), as I didn’t see many bad reviews before buying it. It does not work as advertised, I’m having problems similar to Jim’s. I’ve tried plugging it in on 4 different computers, 1 of them actually recognizes it without asking for some unheard of USB drivers but this computer can’t read from it or write to it. Anyone had any luck returning one of these? Given the wealth of problems you’d think we could all band together to get some kind of fix…
I have been a fan of Western Digital hard drives for many years, but that ended with this product. I purchased an Essential Edition 250GB drive for my daughter as a Christmas gift, by New Years it was DOA. Giving WD the benefit of the doubt, I exchanged it for an identical replacement. This one made it until early March. Three clicks and it turns off. WD says there is nothing I can do but return it under a RMA. They can do nothing about the lost data. So much for using this drive for backing up important files. I’ve have had at least a dozen WD drives over the years and never had a failure, they just became obsolete because of their size. This drive SUX!
I really wish mine had buggered itself straight away instead of wiping 150Gbs. It turns on automatically when plugged in, so the ON button is actually a DATA-ERASE button. I lightly brushed against it when moving another piece of equipment.
Why is there a large, unindented, data-rease button, that has less reistance than my mouse button, on the FRONT!?!?!
I too have just bought a mybook pro edition II
drive I am using vista business and I can see it in the
device manager but it will not show up in my computer
can anyone point me to a site that has a patch or something
to allow me to use this drive
thanks
yeah jim I just bought a pro edition II 1 tb hard drive
myself and at first it wouldnt come up on my computer
now it wont even power up
do you know if its the power supply or the drive itself
I have only had it 2 days
Lol, same problem with WD MyBook 500GB like you all.. I hope à can save my photos and other data from that shit.
WD NEVER MORE
So, I bought a 250gb, put all my pictures on it rid of my old drive because I thought everything was good. So, I wiped my old drive and had no issues for a few months…then today, it just doesn’t show up on windows. Disk manager works and sees it, wd diagnostics sees it, no dice on being able to bring it up in windows explorer.
Any thoughts?
No, but exactly the same symptoms, same problems..
It is not possible, so many breaked disks.. WD must know about that.
Did anybody try to connect HDD directly trough ATA?
Wow, all you guys are having so much problem. My Essential 500GB works as smooth as you can hope for. I usually have bad luck while getting a add-on for my computer. But this drive is just working great. I never let it run for hours though. Since there’s always a chance you can knock it on its side or cause it to shake. External drives are risky that way. If you use it keeping that in mind then it will last a long time. Although I have no idea why so many of your machines can’t see the drive.
Purchased a WD My Book 320 GB drive around Feb 25. Just got around to plugging it in last night on my little old iBook G3 via firewire.
It didn’t appear on the desktop so I tried it on my Powerbook G4. Again it didn’t appear. Then I tried it on my old G4 tower dual and again, nothing. Switched the cables, thinking that it might be a bad firewire cable, and again, nothing. To make things worse, now it wouldn’t even power up. Gave up, put it back in the box. Planned to take it back.
BUT NOW, the firewire ports on both the iBook and Powerbook are toast. The damned thing fried both ports due to what I think is a faulty firewire cable (they won’t even recognize a digital movie camera anymore). Is this possible? The ports worked fine before (I use them in target mode all the time - up until now). What’s the chance of two of my firewire ports failing at the same time. I blame WD and this dumb drive. Now I dont’ know what to do.
This thing really sucks. Never again.
Add me to the list of people who will never buy a WD drive again. Bought a 160 GB MyBook, backed up my entire computer to it because I had to reformat my internal hard drive, and then the WD hard drive failed within a month of buying. I lost everything, and support from WD is awful. I can get the $$ back for the failed drive, but what about the $1200 I am being quoted for data recovery costs?!?!?! Never, never, go near one of these drives!
I now have four drives from them and all are fine:
MyBook 160 USB
MyBook Prem 250 USB/Firewire
MyBook Prem 1TB as mirror
Passport 60GB USB
I have used them on all of my Macs and had no issues at all, at first the 1TB was loud but after the firmware that has sorted that. I did post on this thread before about the noise but after getting the FirmWare I though to post back and say how it went.
I have a few Lacie as well but I have no problem in buy some more WD and as they are so cheap as Amazon UK I will get a couple more.
R
don’t buy wd storage book or whatever.
build your own using seagate drives. they have 5 year warrenty on the drives itself. pick them up at tirgerdirect.
I received a 500GB MyBook Premium Edition for Christmas. However, I couldn’t actually hook it up because my computer didn’t have a working USB 2.0 Drive. I got a new PCI USB 2.0 card and finally connected the WD drive to my computer. Windows XP SP2 recognized the new PCI card and the WD drive straight away and found the drivers they needed, so I thought I was in business. My drive was shipped FAT32 so I reformatted it for NTFS, made a back-up of my internal hard drive and then moved over my pictures and music. It was around this time that the error messages started and Windows stopped recognizing the drive. I had to shut down my computer, physically unplug the WD drive and reboot for it to be recognized again.
The alarming messages continued, including ones that told me all my data was lost. Luckily, each time I rebooted my computer the drive would reappear and my data was still there as well. After doing this several times I was able to send all my data back to the internal drive. I reformatted the WD drive and ran their extended diagnostic test. It ran for about 8 minutes before returning an error message that the test had been stopped because there were too many errors/bad sectors.
Alas, it looks like I got a dud right out of the box. It was a present and since it was bought around Christmas time I doubt my friend can get their money back, so I’m going to return it to Western Digital for a replacement. Customer Service was nice enough about it I guess. I got through without being on hold for too long (maybe 3 minutes) and they gave me my RMA number and information on how to track the progress of my return/replacement on their website. I have no idea how long this will take and meanwhile I’m back to square one; a computer with a 20GB internal hard drive and only 3GB of available space left! It’s such a shame; I’d read such good reviews on this particular drive on Amazon.com, but I guess you never know which drive will give you the best results.
Add me to the list of WD haters!
I’ve been using my 250GB Premium Edition My Book for 11 months and today I turn it on and none of my 3 computers can view the drive. I could get a replacement under my 1yr warranty, but what for? This would most likely occur again within the next year or sooner…
If anyone happens to find a solution to recover My Book data please share w/ us all! Thanks!
I have owned the My Book Pro II 1TB for 2 months, and love it. A few things:
1) Needs drivers from the included CD before it will be detected by Windows, due to having an integrated (and proprietary) RAID controller.
2) Unit must be reformatted to NTFS to run in XP, as it comes from factory formatted for NFS (Apple). Until you do this…no dice, no access.
3) Secret tip!: Take the unit apart (4 easy screws) and flip the internal fan from intake to exhaust (it is only held into the frame by a rubber surround, just pop it out and flip it around). Makes unit 100% quieter!!
4) Download and install the WD fan firmware update after flipping the fan, makes it quieter still!
I really like mine, hope others have good experiences with theirs.
Bought a Western Digital My Book Pro 500GB in August (from Konplett.ie), now today it won’t power up. God - i hope i have not lost my 400GB of data : (
I´ve had similar problems with a Western Digital My Book Pro 500 GB. I purchased from Amazon.com. Item arrived promptly. Didn’t mount at first try, had to reboot. I went to sleep happily. Next morning disk won’t mount and started making a loud “click” noise. I tried everything I could think of, on several computers (Mac and Windows), using USB and Firewire to no avail. Contacted Amazon, who sent a replacement right away. I have been using it for two weeks now, hopefully I will have no more problems.
PS - I also own a few Maxtor OneTouch 300GB. They have been working just fine for two or three years so far. No complains here.
Just bought WD My Book 250 GB from newegg,
it keep disconnecting after 20 days of use, too bad i haven’t do enough
search when i bought this crap.
This will be my last Western Digital hard drive that i bought
I bought 2 My Book Pro Edition II drives to be used for archiving backups from Windows 2003 Servers. Installation was OK - I configured them as RAID 1 and used NTSF format. The first sign of trouble was that they would go offline in the middle of backups. There was a firmware patch that I thought might solve this. But the software for this was intended for XP machines so I had to move the drives to attempt the upgrade. Every time I tried to run the patch the drive would go offline and it would fail. After a 40 min wait for WD tech support I learned that this problem was often caused by plugging the unit into a power strip and should try a wall socket instead. I was incredulous but tried it and it worked - the patch was successfully installed. I still can’t come up with a reason for the power strip problem and clearly the drives shouldn’t be so sensitive to this. Time will tell if this solves my problem with the drives going offline. Overall I am very frustrated with all these problems but I can’t find a good alternative and not much was really suggested in this thread either. I only can use an external USB with these servers or perhaps a network drive. Not many inexpensive RAID mirror options out there. I’m tempted to build a drive array without RAID and just use multiple drives for redundancy.
I found a problem with the My Book Premium II 1TB this morning and found the solution in the pages at tom’s blog. Using a mac, the start up sequence must be followed.
1. Turn on computer (wait until it is really turned on)
2. Plug in power on HD
3. Plug in firewire.
This solved my problem. WD does have this information on their website. I don’t read manual, so I don’t know if it is there.
Finally, I’m pretty sure the big blue button on the front is not a data erase button. It is probably tied into some back-up feature, but I hit it a lot trying to get the HD turned on and no data lost.
@Trevor
Of course its not a data-erase button. The other guy previously was really frustrated I guess.
Its a ON button. I use it all the time. If you disconnect manually by clicking USB icon in system tray you have to press the button to start it up again.
BUT, its not an OFF button! People are probably not realizing that. If you turn the drive off by this button you’re screwed. You can’t/shouldn’t turn off an USB device with a button. It MUST be powered down by the computer. And its best not to do that while shutting down Windows. XP can shut down too quickly for USB devices to get enough time to perform final write/read jobs.
Be specially careful if your Windows freezes after you’ve copied files to the drive. A hard reboot can mean the drive will lose those files, more so if you have activated the buffer in the drive. You should activate this buffer if you’re using the drive for constant read/write jobs over a long period of time, otherwise the drive can overheat and crash. Its a fact with all drives.
And just because its called a ‘portable drive’ doesn’t mean you can ‘drop’ it in your backpack and go.
1) Got a My Book 500 Pro for my brand new MBP Core2, DOA… wasn’t recognised on any on my computers, 2 Macs, 2 PCs.
2) Found out all my Firewire ports were dead at the Mac store but didn’t blame it on the drive, if fact, I thought maybe it was my Mac that killed the drive.
2) Did the RMA, they sent me another drive but same shit. Now after reading this thread, I suspect it may have fried my wife’s Firewire ports on her (even newer) MacBook.
Countless hours wasted, two dead on arrival drives and one (maybe even two, we’ll see) damaged laptop(s) and all this before I gave WD a chance to lose my data. I also found all this out AFTER I got my drive, unreal! WD is a joke.
Like other people over here, my WD MyBook 320Gb Premium died on me last week.
It was about an hour after midnight and the disturbing infamous repeating clicking noise actually woke me up!
I used it as my main drive in a Linux setup and have used it for approximately 9 months. I’ve lost a tremendous amount of data. I have backups of most parts, but some historical stuff is gone forever.
I’ve tried to salvage my data by takng the drive itself out of the casing and connecting it to an external sata controller in another PC and guess what?
Smoke. Yes, smoke! I’ve never seen a drive literally smoke! Usually it is the controller in the casing that gives up on you first and then usually you have a small 2nd chance to get your data off the drive (or at least some of it) by connecting it to another controller, but in this case, nothing but smoke.
I’ve made pictures of the destruction: For those curious, take a look and see why you should avoid MyBooks (imho):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7889865@N08/
Just wanted to share my experience with WD MyBook Premium Edition 320GB. I got one for my b-day to use with my AGP Graphics Power Macintosh G4. It’s an older model G4, but the WD label says it works with Mac.
The drive NEVER mounted via Firewire. In fact, it fried one of my Mac’s Firewire ports AND fried the Firewire bridge on my other OWC Mercury Elite external drive. I’m so angry this drive has damaged my computer and my other backup drive I could just spit!!!
Luckily the backup drive is OK. I just pulled it out of the drive enclosure but a new enclosure for the Mercury Elite is $60.00.
NEVER AGAIN WESTERN DIGITAL! SCREW YOU GUYS!!!
I’M BUYING A LACIE!
I bought one of the 1T My Book Pro II’s, as a RAID mirror. It works pretty well so far. Note that the drives are Caviar SE’s, which are a long way from Enterprise drives.
The fan setup is pretty dumb, what with the sealed bottom and tiny ports. I changed it by taking off the ‘cage cap’, then shoved the fan and its rubber shroud (shroud right side up, fan upside-down) in the cage next to the SATA connectors. It fits like it was made to. Set the drive upside-down so the hot air blows up. Keep the cage cap in case you need to return your drive. No irreversible changes, and it runs cool and quiet.
Note that I used my own Firewire 400 cable. I’m glad I did, because after reading this blog I tested the cable that came in it. It’s wired wrong, shunting the power to one of the data pairs.
I repeat: the firewire 400 cable will destroy your computer. DO NOT USE IT. Test it first, or just throw it away and get your own cable. Or just buy some other drive that doesn’t ship with a reject cable.
Ok i was going to buy the WD mybook pro but before i did i decided to run a search about it and run on this site.After reading all these cases where a problem was almost immediate then i decided not to buy a western digital drive.However i dont know which drive should i go for since i am looking for a 500GB external drive and have no clue which company is good and has no problems like WD.Any suggestions?
Well, I’m on my 2nd WD 500 GB My Book from Costco. They both show up on USB, neither of them show up on firewire. Yet, I have two other drives that work fine on firewire.
Does anyone have a fix for why the drive won’t show up on firewire? I find it hard to believe that I got TWO drives with a bad firewire interface.
And yes, I’ve formatted them to NTFS, and I’ve installed their firewire driver.
From everything I’m reading here, I’ll probably just take this second drive back to Costco and order a Maxtor or some other drive.
Highly annoyed,
Jeff
I use two MyBook Premium 500 GB. I appreciate them very much and I don’t have any problem, except for a particular case which I already explained (03/08/2007). And the support service seems really poor.
I find normal to meet a certain percentage of dissatisfaction for any product. And, of course, a hard disk is a particularly delicate component. I heard horrors about all brands of hard disks. The title of the blog could be changed for:
“Any drive name” sucks!
The result would be probably the same one.
I think that the majority of the encountered problems are due to one of the following causes:
- The user did not read to the first line of the manual. Thus, we learn that the My Book Pro II is preformatted for Macintosh, which is very exceptional and, in my case, I am charmed by it).
- The disc was subjected to bad handling (Software or physical).
- The unit, unfortunately, is within a certain acceptable percentage of defective product.
Beside that, I believe that there are thousands of very satisfied users.
I still have confidence with WD products, and I consider, despite everything, acquiring soon a MyBook Pro Edition II (1 TB). It offers, in my opinion, the best quality/price ratio and comes with a three years guarantee.
I am however worried by the comment of Randy concerning the Firewire cable. I will follow his recommendation and would like that he indicates a sure way to test it.
To Jeff
Look at my post some weeks ago (March 08). I had the same problem. The only solution is to connect them in USB or, at best, like i do for now, connect one in Firewire and the other in USB.
The WD support service just confim me that they are still working to solve this problem…
I agree with Nikos D - this is a stupid bug.
To fix:
1. Unplug from power.
2. Plug usb into PC.
3. Plug back in Power.
4. It works.
I spent several hours at this. Pluging in and out USB - but the problem can be fixed by following the steps above.
Mel
I don’t know a good way to test the cable without a multimeter. Even then it’s a bit difficult given the scale of the firewire plug: it’s a bit thinner than most probes can fit into.
I can describe the problem a bit more. A normal firewire 6-pin plug has three pairs of wires, down the long axis. The two pairs nearest the triangle side are data, and the last pair near the squared side is the power and ground. Normally the two data pairs reverse in the cable. You can search for ‘firewire pinout’ for pics. The cable in the My Book box reverses the top pair and the bottom pair, with the middle passed through.
Test for continuity between the pins at the square ends of the connectors. Those two pins should pass straight through on the cable, unless it’s bad. The bad cable will conduct between the square and triangle ends.
Thank you very much Randy, it’s very clear and it will be very useful.
Hi K2103:
My problem is not that i AM trying to connect 2 drives at once. I am saying that each one (connected by itself) would not be recognized on firewire).
Anyone have any ideas?
well on a different computer, the WD drive finally showedup on firewire - it brought up a display saying it was going out to the internet to find the right driver, and after about 5 minutes, finally the drive showed up. This is very different from what happens on my main computer (nothing happens at all)
I cannot help you much more because my experience is on Macintosh.
But I know that the sequence of the operations may be critical: The computer power on, the drive’s power cord connection, the FireWire cable connection and, if need, the power push button (I’m not sure of the order to follow).
A PC user should be more advised.
I purchased the Pro Edition II recently. I connected it to USB 2.0 and and after installing the Raid Manager I configured it for Raid 1. 10 GB of files were gathered and started the transfer. Within minutes XP Pro reported a Write fail and that data was lost. Checking wdc.com produced several possibilities of which the most likely was newer USB drivers (link to Microsoft):
Usbehci.sys 5.1.2600.2783 25-Oct-2005
Usbport.sys 5.1.2600.2783 25-Oct-2005
I have yet to find the driver versions.
On a second PC, XP Home, showed the same write fail and also froze from time to time. Also Raid Manaer started to fail stating that the status of the Raid array was “unknown”. The software then suggested reinstalling the Raid Manager.
One or both drives were out of balance as any surface that the unit was placed on became a sounding board and produced an annoying hum. If the unit was placed on the floor, the room below was engulfed with the hum. The only way to reduce/eliminate the hum was to place the unit on a towel.
The above problems were emailed to WD support. The first reply only touched on the OS. It took 3 more emails before they would acknowledge the vibration stating “Generally, the drive may experiecne some vibration. However, if this becomes noticbally worse then you may want to replace the drive as a precaution.” The spelling mistakes were from the support person. Sigh.
Needless to say their support is not stellar. I was looking for a simple solution for my son to store hundreds of GB (redundantly) of medical information at school with minimal support from dad. My first pass at this device has caused me to return it to the store and seek something else that works and doesn’t require ear plugs. Maybe I bought a unit that was made on a Monday or Friday and I understand that sometimes it happens. However their support put the nail in the coffin.
I have a 30GB Maxtor in an external case on USB 2.0 and can slam it as hard as possible with no errors.
Hey Tom,
I’ve had a very similar experience here’s my story:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/WesternDigitalMyBookProEditionII1TBTakeOne.aspx
then this happened:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/WesternDigitalMyBookProEditionII1TBSecondTryGoesUpInSmoke.aspx
Finally, the guy at the CostCo return counter told me that they’d sold 12 recently, 6 of which had been returned.
Not good.
I have had a 250GB external USB2 drive on my PC for the past 3 years. It cost me £80 then (dabs.com are really good for cheap!) and it has never failed me. Inside, it has a Seagate IDE drive. It seems that WD are trying to be too clever, and have cut off their nose to spite their face.
ge
After several WD and Maxtor disks - both internal and external - have died on me, I picked Samsung SpinPoint disks, and have never looked back. They’re fast, they’re cool, they’re quiet, they perform well and they have NEVER left me dangling in limbo….. I have two 160GB, two 250GB, two 400GB and a single 500GB ones, both internally and externally, and they just keep humming along very nicely….
Thanks K2103. I’ve returned the 2nd WD My Book and purchased a Seagate product. Works like a champ, first time, no drivers necessary, all is well. And really cheap too (because it’s not the latest model with the fancy flashy black and orange case, Fry’s is selling 400 meg disks for $119.99 - I thought this was good enough to get two! :-)).
I had the 500 GB MyBook Premium running fine on both PC and Mac - moving data back and forth.
I got a free little flash drive with a Staples DVD-R purchase and tried using it on my PC and Mac (which it said it could do) - the flash drive had problems with my Mac so I threw it away. Now my Mac won’t recognize the MyBook, even though the MyBook turns on and seems to be running fine when I hook it up to the Mac via usb or firewire - I just can’t see it or access it on the desktop or through finder. My PC has no problem recognizing the MyBook - just the Mac. The ports should be fine because my other harddrives are recognized no problem.
WD support says that it’s not a MyBook problem - it’s the Mac. I’ve tried all the different power-chain orders and still no icon. Any suggestions?
Yes, the Firewire 400 cables are defective… wish I had read this before.
Here’s the pin outs on this cable, the 30V pin 1 is going to data pin 5… Jeeeeeeeezuuuuuusssss!!!!!
1 -> 5
2 -> 6
3 -> 3
4 -> 4
5 -> 1
6 -> 2
http://pinouts.ru/Slots/ieee1394_pinout.shtml
We got a bunch of these drives at work, the PC folks were happily using USB, I was using the Firewire 800 on my Mac, but we gathered up the 400 cables to use for cloning machines. I loaned one cable out, that fried a G5 and Powerbook G4’s firewire ports. But to troubleshoot the Powerbook I used the same cable, boom there went my MacBook Pro. Then I used another cable to do some data recovery, boom a 12″ Powerbook and MacBook, FW ports toasted. A coworker used one, and his Mac Book Pro is toast. So yes, WD’s cheap cables have inflicted THOUSANDS of dollars of damage. IDIOTS! No recall?!?! jerks.
So out of 8 drives we had 6 with bad cables, here’s the serial number info:
2064-701091-002
Rev. AA
AX 05/JAN/07
Look for the white sticker on the bag. The Connector is rounded on top, flat on bottom, with 3 seration going around.
We had one that had the same serial, printed directly onto the bag, but no Rev. AA, the cable style was different (rounded all around) and it was ok. If you have a multimeter, test continuity on pin 1, the bottom left pin when the flat side is on bottom. On the defective cables it goes to the top left pin (flat side on bottom).
Surprise!
I have just received this email.
Important notice from Western Digital regarding your WD MyBook External Hard Drive
To our valued customers:
We recently discovered that the FireWire 400 cable that was shipped with your Western Digital My Book hard drive does not comply with our specifications. This FireWire 400 cable will not work properly with, and could even damage, your My Book hard drive. As a service to our valued customers, we are offering to replace this FireWire 400 cable, free of charge, in accordance with the limited warranty that accompanies your hard drive. You should dispose of the FireWire 400 cable that was included with your My Book hard drive. If you would like to receive a replacement FireWire 400 cable, free of charge, please click on the link below to validate your name and shipping address so that we may send you your replacement cable.
Thank you for selecting our products. We hope that we continue to number you among our customers in the future.
Link: http://websupport.wdc.com/rd.asp?p=cr&f=2&c=711929&[email protected]
Western Digital Corporation
Isn’t a very responsible company???
Make me laugh.
I just tried to connect a brand new WD 500gb My Book Pro to my G4 (still running OS 10.2.8 because I’m using old Pro Tools Digi 001). Anyway, I tried USB, FW 400, and FW 800. It didn’t mount, but the drive showed up in Disk Utility. I tried to partition in DU, but it just locked up. I connected the drive to another G4 running 10.4, and it almost instantly showed up. I partitioned the drive to Mac extended on the 10.4 Mac (only took a few seconds), removed it, then connected via FW 400 to the Mac running 10.2.8. The drive showed up! Now I’m backing up about 400 GB from a Lacie big disk extreme that’s starting to flake out.
The WD packaging says it works with OS 10.2.8, but I guess you have to format it to Mac extended first. Sucks for people who don’t have a new OSX.
Also, sucks to hear that so many are having problems with My Books. After reading the good reviews at Amazon, I decided on My Book instead of another Lacie. My question is, what brand of external HD is dependable? I do a ton of audio / video work, so I need something that will last. I’d like to stay under $1/GIG. The My Book cost $223 at B&H Photo, so that’s less than 50 cents per GIG. However, I’m willing to pay more for better quality. Any suggestions.
On Mar 8th, 2007 at 9:21 pm K2103 reported
An other stupid bug.
It happens for me, too.
We started with two 500G drives. Main, and backup. Fine. A little thrashing, to get them mounted, but fine. Oh… well, and we were told they were Mac formated already, but they were FAT. Reformat to Journaled Mac style, all ok.
Then we got two more… Main2 and backup2. Fine, fill ‘em up. Let backup run overnight. Gad, these things run HOT. Had ‘em on their side like a LaCie, not standing up like a book.
Now. Try to connect Main and Main2. No mount. Try one at a time. No Mount. Worry. Finally use USB, get backup2 done. Worry more. Replace the non-mount?
Remember the wise words of K2103:
“It appears that the problem is caused by the identification number which is the same one on the two units: 40718836345943965″
Indeed it is. If you connect an ID clone, it shuts everything down, and it takes a computer re-start to get anything back. Doesn’t matter if they are one on FW800 and one on FW400, still shuts down.
Of the 4 drives we have, we have only two ID numbers, two drives with 4071884493475029 and two with 40718836345943965.
Hmmmm.. Do folk have to BUY ID numbers? Is WD bootlegging ID clones or something?
Notice, each pair we bought would work together. Perhaps the folk at B&H can tell which box’s have which ID #s. The SN lable is thick on one, thin on the other.
OMG Western Digital why do you suck so? I can’t figure out how to get my My Book to work so I’m gonna try and get a refund. I can’t believe WD would release a drive without a rescue disk with the drivers. My comp can’t recognize the disk after accidentally unplugging it and I can’t figure out how to install the driver. What a pain and loss of data.
MY MY BOOK 500GB BUTTON JAMMED EVERYTHING IS ON IT
Wow…You all are having a lot of problems!!!!!!..Over the last 6 years i have used maxtor, seagate, toshiba Lacie and WD drives, and can honestly say that i would not trust any of them particularly lacie and maxtor, except for the wd drives, which ( touch wood have never failed…so far !)
I have a few my books ( 320gig) all no problem…I have a my book pro 11…set up as a raid 1, and it works perfectly without a hitch…I updated the software and drivers from the WD site and it really is a great drive.
I am about to buy a my book world 11 and have been looking around the net for reviews and hence found yours. It seems that there are quite a few complaints…in fact the same number as for this drive and i am begining to think that it is not the drive in general but some drives that are just duff…They must be selling hundreds of thousands of these drives and for the number of complaints they have, it is not that bad.
I would say if you have a bad drive just send it back and get it replaced…there is an automatic 2 year warranty on anything electrical in the eu regardless of what manufacturers say!…Mine came with a 3 year warranty!…Anyway send it back stating ” not fit for purpose ” and they have to replace it.
On the negative side, and this really is the only negative with western digital, their tech support people are really useless, and their internet support is not much better. If they solved this WD would be perfect from my experience, so don’t give up….i would never change back to the other brands as i got my fingers burned too many times!
Good luck…. Sean
I purchased a WD My Book, and only the USB worked…firewire would not. When I contacted WD they said it was a bad firewire cable and that I should return the drive to Amazon, have them send me a new one, and DO NOT use the firewire cable that comes with the new drive. Instead they would send me a cable themselves, and I should throw away the new cable from the drive. I asked if it was possible that the new cable they were sending me would work with the drive I already had, and they said that it probably fried the firewire port in the drive. From their responses, it seems like this is a common problem, and that the firewire cables enclosed with the drives are possibly corrupted. I just got the new drive in the mail today, and am waiting for WD’s special delivery cable.
Lucky if the cable did not also fried the FireWire port of the computer as it happened in several cases. Did you check it?
@ k2103,
Thanks a ton! Yes, it is the firewire cable. Thankfully it didn’t fry my firewire ports (at least I don’t think it did) and the USB after some hoop jumping started working. Do you have the full link to the WD cable recall page?
I guess I’m not the only one.
After months of trying in vain to get my Netgear SC101 to work, I bought a Western Digital 500 GB My Book (Premium, I believe). That’s one expensive nightlight! Initially, it worked fine. I began backing up our photo archive. I didn’t access it for a month or so, and today I find out that I cannot access it at all. Did it get so lonely that it put itself out if its misery? It shows up in Device Manager and if I unplug it and plug it back in, I get a drive with a question mark, but that soon disappears.
We have thousands of CRW images with no place to back up. What does one do these days for high-capacity external storage?!? I’m at a loss… mentally and financially.
-Daniel
FireWire cable recall.
I did not find a specific cable recall page. It is a personnel email sent to all registered users at WD. You must be registered or contact the service support.
http://www.wdc.com/en/index.asp
It works on Linux (see http://linu.gs/misc/remember/wd-mybook-1TB-on-linux.php ). Hope mine wont’ blow up…
Hey All
Just adding my gripe to the already huge list of dissatisfied customers. The MyBook External HDD series is utter ratshit.
I bought the product home and hooked it up to my laptop. I began copying my photos, mp3’s and movie files over to my new toy.
Went out (it being a Friday night) where I drank copious amounts of gin.
Staggered home to notice that my drive had seemingly powered down. Woke up the next morning and hit the power button with no luck.
Scratched head.
Reconnected all leads and tried again.
Still no luck.
Checked online support on the WD website which offered NO TROUBLESHOOTING and so I lodged an email support request containing details of my issue.
Browsed around the internet until I found you guys! What the hell is going on??? Has anyone reported this to consumer affairs?
Cheers, John
I totally agree WD finally has admitted to a fire wire problem which they are send me a new wire but that is not the major problem
In my eyes WD support email is garbage, they never respond oand when you check to see what emails where already send you personal file folder is wiped clean
WD Sucks in so many ways the CEO had better count his blessings if he’s making a dime at all because I will never buy another WD product in my lifetime
this My book fiasco and lack of support has done it for me
Unlike you, I exchanged lots of emails with Western Digital support since four months.
(My problem relates to the connection of two MyBook simultaneously in FireWire.)
They always answered quickly and very courteously.
Alas, they did nothing but turn in round and never solved anything, except suggesting a RMA, a return to the store, and even buying another brand.
My last comment was addressed to Mike P, from which the comment mysteriously disappeared.
Author: Mike P
Comment:
I totally agree WD finally has admitted to a fire wire problem which they are send me a new wire but that is not the major problem
In my eyes WD support email is garbage, they never respond oand when you check to see what emails where already send you personal file folder is wiped clean
WD Sucks in so many ways the CEO had better count his blessings if he’s making a dime at all because I will never buy another WD product in my lifetime
this My book fiasco and lack of support has done it for me
The history of my dead WD 1TB Pro Edition II just ended with total crash and all data (420 GB) lost.
When connection to the PC with firewire I smelled some burning plastic and after that it was impossible to connect to the unit.
WD support didn’t respond to my emails at all - and the only useful info came from this website.
I also got the permission from local dealer to open the unit to try to save the data directly from the discs. Because I had formated the disc as one partition this turned out to be impossible (the discs came up as possible connection (one with 912 GB and the other as “not formatted”). Tried 10 different combination of setup in BIOS, but no luck. (The local dealer said that WD cut all support and warranty when you open the unit. Is that what they call “customer support”?)
For my sake I now have changed the unit with 2x Seagate FreeAgent (750GB) - for no charge from the local dealer.
Lesson learned:
- Allways backup of ALL data - also in production fase. (I lost some.)
- No partions on more than one disc (if data is critical).
- No WD ever!
To all colleuges responding to this website. Thanks for a lot of useful information. (No such thing from WD…)
I bought a WD My Book 250Gb. Worked for a day or so. I copied all my music and docs, and software from an old banger of a Maxtor 80Gb external HD that’s been going for years.
I formatted my 80Gb, to give to my father in law for his photos.
Switch on my WD drive the following day, and NOTHING.!!!!!
No joy from WD support.
Bought a USB 2.0 SATA/IDE interface (€20), took out the Hard drive and connected it - got my data off - onto an Iomega drive
Now using the WD casing as a door stop.
Won’t buy WD again. EVER…
Man I didnt sleep a wink last night, I backed up my video files(320G) off my pc onto my Ibook pro 500G (1 month old), everything went accross no worries. I than delete my original material to clear up some space on the old pc, turn back on the i book, the pc recognises it, i open “my computer” the drive is now called external drive, was comming up as “my book” before that. click on the drive to open and bam crashes out, try again and again. no joy, bring the drive into work try it on the old powerbook g4 and it only sees it in utility, cant do anything but erase it, cant do that nead the media. So can anyone help a brother out on retriving the media. I am a video editor and have worked with many different types of drives over the years, skuzzi, usb, firewire and have used a program called disc warrior on the skuzzis that used to work a treat, anyone heard of any equivelant today. Ive had major problems with lacie over the years and now this WD is going to drive me fuckin nuts, I have found G-raid to be the most reliable drive so far, but there 500euros for 500 gigs!
yeah, my western digital drive just failed during a file transfer. i just lost $2000 worth of sound fx. i HATE this company right now!!!
I’ve long been a fan of WD - never had any trouble until now. Been running a My Book 320GB Premium for 8 months, then the other day it clicked about 8 times as it turned on, although it worked once booted. As with others have since been worken by a clicking fit to find it’s not recognised any more. Now I’m frantically trying to back up everything on to DVD before it conks out for good! RMA here I come!
Seems scary to think people are having these in up to a terrabyte and are prone to breaking! back up your back up drive people!
Folk, is there any chance of getting more detailed post-mortems? I am sorry if that is a morbid request.
Was the drive running very hot? Was its cooling compromised in any way? Was it lying sideways, or standing up like a book. Was it in constant use? Turned on and off a lot? Never used but once?
My four 500G My Book drives are running ok here, after figuring out the duplicate id number problem.
But they are not used a LOT, and not for a long time.
How do I tell for sure which one is the 400 cable? The pictures in the manual are muddy enough that I can’t feel confident that I am distinguishing which photo belongs to which cable. I am still waiting on my Firewire 800 PCI Card so I can wait and use the USB, assuming the XP formatting to NSFT goes well.
I am glad that I found this site AFTER I bought it because I am hoping (praying) that I will be one of the few who aren’t so disappointed.
Followed SNAKE’S directions and everything is great for now. Let’s see if it lasts. I have it set to RAID 0 to use it as a music server, so this is going to be interesting.
Yes sir.
Same problem with the 320gb, I returned today to the store, at the same store we tried to test 3 new ones! and guess what…no one works with the fire wire connection!. I understand now that probably is because the issue of the wrong cable. I can explain why blow up the port of my old drive, which I tried to connect to my computer with the same 400 fire wire cable. The result is that the port in my old drive is broke, and tons of video files inside. Now I have to pay to get out this data
thanks to WD, you sucks!
Hey Guys
This is the discussions I have had with WD FYI.
Hi There
I have had a look through your troubleshooting documentation, however I was not able to find the answer that I was looking for.
Recently I bought an external hard drive. I bought it home and managed to install it and begin backing up files. But when I tried to access it the following day I was not able to access the drive anymore. I have had a look at the case and noticed that none of the lights are turned on. I attempted to press the button on the front to get it working that way as well. I tried to use a different power source, however I was still not able to get it to work.
Is there any thing else that I could try - that I have not thought of yet?
Cheers, John
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Then they replied
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Dear John,
Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support.
I have a few questions about this issue. Are you plugging your external hard drive’s A/C adapter into a power strip or directly into a wall socket? If you are using a power strip or battery backup then we recommend that you connect your hard drive directly into a wall socket. In the past, we have seen several customers who have had issues using power strips and battery backup devices.
Also, if you remove the data cable from your external hard drive does it turn on? What happens if you plug the drive into a different A/C outlet at your location? See the link below for more information.
Title: The red and green lights stay on or blink and flash continuously when the external drive is powered on.
URL: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1314&p_created=1107822814
Sincerely,
Jeremy H.
Western Digital Service and Support
http://support.wdc.com
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Then I replied
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Hello
The troubleshooting information I was provided gave me the impression that no one read my request. In my request, I stated that there was no power to my external HDD. Can someone (perhaps with a more intelligence than the previous goon who replied to my question) explain to me why plugging an external HDD with no visible signs of power will assist in trouble shooting? I don’t think a guide on what to do when my HDD lights are blinking is like the issue I have - there is NO POWER TO THE DEVICE!
While trying to get a better understanding of what had happened to my precious childhood photos, mp3’s and movies I located a site which had 22 pages (since then it has of course grown as there is at least 1 post a day) of feedback relating to this product. Please refer to the link below:
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/western-digital-my-book-pro-edition-ii-sucks/
I pity any person that has to work on the WD Help Desk with such a HOPELESS product. I mean if your product was true to its motto ie “Count Your Life On It” I would be dead - and so would 22 pages of other unsatisfied customers! I would like to propose a new motto, “WD Count Their Life On It” - perhaps then you would have the necessary motivation to distribute quality products.
So can someone (really this time) assist me.
John
Hi John
I dont want to be agravating or anything, just want to gather as much info on the WD as I can, so I can avoid problems with the ones I have.
It sure seems absurd that the WD wall wart can have problems running off a power strip, dont you think? So I guess the first thing is to find out if the power adaptor is putting out what is should. Any number of ways to check that, from a meter, another drive, a light bulb.
I also found the drives are really cranky about what is done when to them. First disconnect everything, then connect power to the drive, then turn on the computer, then connect the fire wire cable.
Before I figured out that the drive, once it gets confused, has to be started up in this exacting way, I was able to get it up on USB.
No lights might not mean no power. The drive may be too confused to turn on its lights when asked. There is a ‘button manager’ software that has to be loaded on the computer, too.
hope it is some wierd thing for you, and not an outright dead drive.
bb
Hello Again
and it can only get worse! Do they have a monkey writing these emails!
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Hello Again
Did you read my previous 2 emails? This is ridiculous!!! Perhaps you could paraphrase what I have said to ensure that you have completely understood the source of my frustration!!!
I do not have a friend who owns a WD HDD, nor will I recommend that any of them buy one. I have a feeling that it is not the power source as when the equipment is plugged in it is warm (but the LIGHTS ARE OUT). Assuming that you know best, please send me a power source (perhaps another USB lead as well) however I would like to stress that its the HDD that is affected and not the power cord.
I assume that given the nature of my issue, WD will be pleased to cover all freight and insurance costs (for the power cord and the cables) to ensure I will get what I have paid for at no additional cost.
Cheers, John
I found this site when I had to search for a reason why my WD 300 had decided to die. As I went further down the comments the bile started to rise - ALL my recent work is on my 300 - how many places do you have to store it?
Finally I found Mel’s
To fix:
1. Unplug from power.
2. Plug usb into PC.
3. Plug back in Power.
4. It works.
Yes, it works indeed - thank you!
Perhaps this could be put at the top - in the actual post itself - it would save a lot of angst for the people it DOES work for - for those of you who it doesn’t - I feel your pain.
S
after using my book pro 500 GBs for one and a half months, the shit can not let me delete files i saved on it (that’s wen using the firewire cable)
wen i put on the USB cable it shows all my folders empty but with this cable i can delete folders. To me it seems this piece of crap from western digital is one day not going to be recognised on my pc and i think i will loose the data in a few weeks or dayz to come,
after reading all the above i recognised that these guyz are just making money out of us but there technology is crap.
I’ve been reading this blog and appreciate all the tips that people have provided. I have a new MacBook Pro and a MyBook Premium and a MyBook Pro. The MyBook Premium is one of the early ones and the MyBook Pro I recently purchased. The MacBook is more sensitive to these drives than my old PowerBook.
The first problem I had with the drives is common one whereby when they are both running, eventually they would put themselves to sleep and jam in anywhere from 5 minutes to about 20 minutes. This is whether they are doing anything or not. And also, whether they are daisy-chained together via the 400 ports, or if one is running via the 400 port and the other through the 800 port.
I examined the Firewire, as per people’s suggestions, but I could not figure out which of the several cables I have were the 400 cables that came with the drives. I haven’t fried a port on the computer yet, so I thought I must be doing okay there.
The next thing I tried was to plug the drives directly into the electrical outlet, bypassing the surge protector. I was sceptical of this suggestion; however, it did help. The drives stayed running together long enough to copy some major files. However, they would sometimes get confused starting up again with the computer. Also, whenever I used the Pro drive (via 800), my iTv (on the 400) would turn off.
The next thing I tried was taking my powered combination USB/Firewire hub out of the loop. This worked. I daisy-chained my MyBook 400 together with the iTv and ran the MyBook 800 by itself through the 800 port. Amazingly, everything now works as it should! Both drives stay running if they are being used, shut on and off with the computer, and iTv stays running.
So, check you hubs, if you are using one.
I will probably try plugging them back into the surge protector as I am afraid of an electrical spike jumping through the MyBook to my MacBook Pro.
I also will try my third (non-MyBook) external drive to see if it plays nice with the MyBooks.
My beef with WD is the replacement Firewire cord they send out is a full 2 feet shorter than the 6 foot one that came with the original device. Unless I put it by my feet under my desk (not a safe spot), I’ll need to go buy a 6 foot cord. This is not acceptable, to send out smaller replacement parts than the originals. I’ve complained to wd and will see the response. Otherwise, thankfully, my drive has worked fine.
I purchased a World Book II Pro with 1 TB network accessible drive. I have experienced none of the problems you have talked about. The sticker on it says it was manufactured in Jan 2007. It has the latest firmware.
It is a little loud. If my surroundings weren’t already loud, I would be annoyed.
The remote access features are cool — and easy. Not exactly open source, but it is reliable and slick.
There is your free invites for all which had been available since the first post so grab it and enjoy w/ out easter eggs BTW that was such a silly idea in first place!!
I also have spent quite a few joyless hours with my new my book pro 5500 gb. Initially I could not find it. Then I would trigger new device but not load drivers. Then - somehow after much fiddling - it suddenly appeared. I started to back up my Windows xp and it ran most of the night (usb1). In morning it suddenly stopped - presumably due to partition limit (?). I thought I got it re-started successfully but now think it resumed back-up onto my original c drive!
That night it appeared dead - many hours fiddling again. At last, seems to be working - not sure why - think unplugging all for several hours and then plugging usb then power cord may have revived it.
I’ve now got it reformating. I also turned computer so it does not suspend at all.
We’ll see how it goes. Any advice on a FAT partition on my c drive? Can I just get rid of it somehow?
Rick
hi
I have bought a WD my book world P 2 , 1 TB (perhaps I have not done this mistake after reading all this . I have tried on 5 different machines and 3 different operating systems (XP, WIND2000 AND WIN2000 SERVER) but non of them recognised it .Every system ask for a driver when I connect directly to a system, according to WD documents xp and win2000 built in driver should be engough but OS built in driver does not make it working. I suppose WD should rewrite driver as their are so many customer complaining. It does recognise it if I connect this HD to my network but not directyly through a USB cable as I want to reformat this HD in NTFS.
does someone has a solution on this problem, i had a premium 500gb that worked just for 1 month before it went dead.
somebody says that you can just open(destroying) the casing of the drive then you’ll get a normal hardrive with an IDE interface, then you could connect it to your pc as a conventional internal drive.
somebody ever tried this before with positive results??
Pierre: I tried two companies (http://www.datahelp.eu/ and http://datarecovery.eu/).. neither didn’t repare or recover my data.
HI
I actually realise my WD HD (MY BOOK WORLD EDITION 2) got a femal A port which is very unusual. noramly its B female. I have connected it with A to A where as all other normal USB device come with A to B usb ports . May be I do need a special cable for this and what I am using to connect (pc to this HD) I have borrowed from someone may be is not the right cable. when i connect my HD with a system it does initially recognise a usb device found message and then it ask for driver .
The driver what I got with cd is not right one or at least it not working on my machines.
Any help will be appreciated
Bought myself a 500Gb Premium edition, same problems. FW 400 doesen’t work, the disk isn’t even recognized via FW connection and USB 2.0 works half the time, half not. I have to turn off my comp, restart it, then the disk works…
Gonna get rid of it before it gets rid of my data. Piece of shit!
Fixed mine!!! I didn’t have time for the warantee return and wanted my data off the drive (My Book 500GB) so I decided to open the sucker up to remove the drive, thus voiding my warantee and found good news - this external suffers from the plug issues of all SATA drives where they work themselves loose. Most PC manufacturers have started using glue to hold the cables on but the WD externals do not, why they wouldn’t think to put a dab of glue on a portable drive is beyond me. I pushed the cable in tight and it came right up. It pulls out at an angle so when it was loose it had enough connection for the PC to see something but the connections it needed to identify and run the drive were disconnected. I’ll add a dab of hot glue later and it should be just fine.
If you are going to do this at home to open the case there are 4 clips on the back (where the cables plug in), one top and bottom on each side, the clips are on the “outside” jacket and clip into the vented plastic, and then the sides slide into a track. I wound up breaking 2 of the clips but it still holds together fine.
I have(had) a My Book Premium 250GB on Firewire that crapped out after 6 months. (click, click, click.) Unfortunately I can’t ask for an RMA because part of my backup was tax data from the last 5 years. So I’m out $150. Does ANYONE know how to open this silly thing so I can destroy the drive? Because of what’s on the platters it I can’t even safely throw the damn thing away.
Based on the amount of negative comments on here I would say a Class Action against WD is probably in order even though none of us would really see a penny of the settlement. I would just like to put WD in their place, hell.
I had similiar problems like most of you. My Western Digital 1 TB Pro would not read on none of my computers. I was literally going nuts. So I did a search and found this thread. I am a professional photographer and I use multiple WD 500 external drives. What had happened is that I was using the power cord from the 500 harddrive and putting it into the 1 TB harddrive. IT DOESN’T WORK! So when I finally put one and one together and put the right power supply in the 1 TB, it worked!! Please make sure you are using the correct power cord (they all look alike) with your 1 TB. Hope this helps.
Keith
Follow up:
I complained in early June that the replacement FW cord they sent me was shorter than the original. To my surprise, WD Finally replied to my complaint stating that they will ship me a new cord (I assume it will be 6 ft like the original). WOW, I had pretty much written them off as ignoring my complaint. So I am happy right now with WD. My 500 GB HD is working fine, though I only use it once every couple weeks. I have a Macintosh, so problems are a rarity anyway. Good Day!
I was in the Apple Store at Toronto’s Yorkdale Mall on Sunday to buy an external hard drive. I was about to buy a MyBook Premium drive (three interfaces) and asked a sales guy there if a firewire II cable was included in the box. He confirmed that it was but suggested that I consider buying another drive rather than the WD.
He told me that they had had a significant number of failures and returns of the devices because there were serious problems with them.
The alternative he suggested was a G-Drive Q (http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-DRIVEQ.cfm)
It was a little more expensive but that it was certainly MUCH more reliable. It also has an E-SATA connection in addition to FW 400, 800 and USB 2.
Another nicety is that it has a substantial heatsink rendering the need for a fan moot. It certainly is very very quiet and like Steve Jobs, I truly appreciate the quiet operation.
Got a MyBook Essential 500 Gig drive for Christmas and it worked great–for six months—now Windows XP recognizes it as an unknown USB device looking for drivers which don’t exist because it is supposed to be “plug and play”. I believe a warranty was purchased for this (it was a gift), but it doesn’t do me much good if I’m just going to get another one that craps out….:(
my quick comment after finding this forum when My Book Premium ES 500 failed — it could not be found by computer (said no driver was installed). Have used this drive for about a month w/ no problems. Rebooted numerous times, tried several combinations of reboot & replug, nothing. Saw NikosD post above in Mar 07 — power up pc first all the way, have drive plugged into usb but without power, plug the power cord into the drive. OMG it worked. Instant fix. thank you NikosD for the solution, only hope that this is not the start of more failures. I have two older WD 3200s that work absolutely fine, so I had no qualms about purchasing this drive, but now I am wary of using it, shame on WD.
I just came home from Best Buys with a 1T Premium Edition My Book, but havn’t opened it. I’m soooo glad I came across this site. After reading some of the entries above, it is getting returned. I had purchased a Micronet 1T drive with 4 250G drive array. They are hot swappable. It is very reliable, but pricy compared to the cheap My Book Solution, however, unreliable digital storage isn’t a value at any price.
I have a my book 500 gb pro edition. It has been working great! Except for that Fat 32 thing which… of course they dont state up front in installing the drive that if you want to copy more than 4gb to your hd that you have to re-format the drive.. SO… in finding a home for my 250 gb i had put on the drive since i bought it a few months ago… I needed to use FW 400… it copied files over.. but now… It wont fire up. I had been using the firewire 800 this whole time.. The drive is still making noise like it wants to start.. im following niko d’s advise but it doesnt seem to be working.. I still have about 150gb of CRITICAL data on the drive.. Anyone PLEASE send me some advise on how to get this baby working.. was it the firewire 400? HELP pleaseeee!
Found this blog after my major Faux Pas with a new MyBook Premium Pro 1TB Drive. Fresh out of the box it worked and I started transferring fils. 150 Gigs Later I shut it off and went to dinner. Came back turned it on and the Vista Business OS would not see the drive. I am an IT Exec in the Creative Field so I am fairly savvy. I found this blog read the info…. No Help. Western Digital Tech Support… No Help… Dell Gold Tech Support…No Help… I noticed in the Device Manager the USB Mass Storage Device Driver was Disabled. No matter what I did Vista would not see the Driver. I moved the Drive over to a WinXP Box and Voila! Automatic Install of the drivers and there’s my Media!!! Hmmmmm…Just to be sure… Dell swapped the drive with a new one ( I know some folks hate Dell Customer Support but in Ten Years I have had no problems with them except for one mis-shipment which they gave me a credit for… worth every penny I pay for the xtra service) I backed up my Worksation…Reformatted the Workstation Drive… and did a fresh install of Vista…Took out the new drive and here’s the rub (In hindsight this may be where I screwed up the first time) When I did the Driver Install from the CD A Vista Security Pop-up came on and warned me the “Driver was unsigned” and gave me two choices… To not install it… or… to install it anyway. I chose to install it anyway. I am thinking I screwed up the first time and picked not to install it and brother if you do that (unless you’re a damn good registry editor) you WILL NOT get the driver to install and hence Vista will not see the drive.
It works just fine now.
Just my two cents and I hope it helps.
WIlliam Hazen
I have three WD Mybooks. 500GB USB2, 500GB Firewire+USB2, and 1TB World Edition II connected via ethernet running as a 500GB RAID 1. They all work great and they have from the day I purchase the first one in early 2006. I use them with a combination of Macs and PCs. I believe I paid about US$250 for the USB2 and later the Firewire drives during 2006, and I recently bought the networked 1TB version for US$290 at Best Buy using a 12% off promotion.
The USB2 and Firewire models should be formatted when you first connect them, with the filesystem appropriate for your use.
You can set up the World Edition without using the setup disk if you check your router to see which DHCP address this NAS drive gets at boot up, then simply point your web browser at it to set up shares and users and change the default password. The web interface is slow and the drive will not perform better than about 3-4 megabytes per second, but as a backup device it works fine and RAID 1 gives you some extra safety. Note that it will take up to about 6 hours to synchronize the drives after you format them for RAID 1. You can even attach another USB2 drive to this box and it will appear in the browser where you can create another share. For high performance NAS, especially using Gigabit ethernet, I’d try something else with a more powerful controller because the little chip in this one really can’t even quite match 100Mbps ethernet.
If you lose the controller somehow but the drive is ok, it should be possible to mount the physical drive on another machine after removing it from the WD case. A Linux formatted drive (including the NAS models) should be readable from Debian for example.
It seems that i am the only one to use my WD MyBook Essential 250 GB with succes, It is running perfectly for over 5 months now.. I am really happy with it, Although they could make the drive a bit more quiet But when the green round light flashes when it recieves data almost all the lights do it normally except for one that comes on a second or so later. Any suggestions?
My MyBook Essential Edition 500 Gb randomly stopped working on one computer, but when I plug it into another computer it works just fine. Any ideas?
hey there. sorry to hear about your troubles with the external drive. i bought the same one. the only difference is i tried using it on my mac mini. worked great there. aside from being really loud. but just now i am trying to put it on my vista machine and it will not recognize. drivers installed.. but doesn’t show up.
i read some of your comments and came across one about the file system. i am going to go try that now but i am almost certain i remember seeing that file system on the device.
i will probably return mine even if i do get it working. i want to get a NAS drive. maybe the world book.. but then again if it’s as loud as this one i might look for something else.
-okan
Can someone please tell me what cable are you using to connect My Book world edition2 1TB as hard drive got A female connector rather B female.
UNBELIEBABLE:
I complained that the FW cable they sent me (to replace the defective ones) was 2 feet shorter than the original. After many weeks they replied and said a new one was shipped and on its way. I open it today to find…another 4 foot cable, even though my complaint specifically stated I wanted a 6 foot one, identical to the original.
I’ve just replied to cust service. We’ll see if anyone is competent. Anyone need a 4 foot FW cord??
Hi all,
I have simple solution or workaround for getting drive to work. My main concern was that i will not be able to get data back from disk. But no fear simple solution is here.
I don’t know what is wrong with my drive but for now main thing is that I can get data from it, after that I will try to reformat it or something but here is the solution.
1. Get VMWARE from http://www.vmware.com
2. Get UBUNTU live Linux distribution from http://www.ubuntu.com
3. Install VMware and run UBUNT as virtual machine.
4. After start when you are inside virtual machine connect MY Book
At this point ubuntu will access your HDD over VMware’s USB disk driver, and your drive will be readable in virtual machine.
There are several ways to transfer files to your host machine, using networking or other methods. I hope this helps.
Hi
i had bought my wd mybook 320gb hdd almost 4months now and just a few days it stoped working whn i connect my hdd it gets detected but i cant see it in my computer or veiw the files any help ???
and is this the problem of the case or is it the hdd
I’ve worked with computers for 14 years, never EVER seen a problem with a Western Digital HDD. They are the only brand I would recommend.
Tips:
If you are not booting from your external drive, make sure your bios is not set to even check for it.
Make sure your bios has all the correct USB settings.
Don’t connect you drive through a cheap €4 hub, in fact, don’t connect your drive through a hub.
If windows tells you that your new hardware is installed, you may need to reboot to use your new hardware, that means reboot - no maybe about it.
Add me in to another disappointed user of My Book Pro. I’m now on my second unit, with WD promising to return my 250GB drive back to Germany for free. But what a shambles. Connected via FW800 (or anything else), the drive often disappears on waking from sleep. Not always, but often. Then the drive sits there not powering up or down and withg blue light on. Won’t remount even on startup or anything. Running 10.3.9 on Mac G5. Previous drive disappeared after being ejected, never to be seen again. Only way to get the drive to re-mount is to disconnect power, then firewire cable. Leave for a bit. Then re-connect. Then the drive remounts! I’m going to replace with the 3rd drive but don’t hold out high hopes. Nevertheless, I’m going to buy another external HD.
i fixed my wd mybook 500gb premium problem. on june 13th i wrote in this same forum about my problem.
what i did was, opened the drive. yes, i took out the disk inside, which is a Caviar SE16 SATA interface 7200rpm 16mb buffer, now i have it connected through my internal sata ports in my pc. recover all of my data inside (which is around 240 gigs, imagine if i rma-it and lost every data) now my wd mybook fits nice in my bookshelf, since i put everything all together again and trust me it looks like new, i hadn’t broken anything to the drive enclosure.
i think the problem with mybook, it’s not very well build. lost my money and will never buy another wd external drive.
I previously posted a problem with my 500 Mybook Pro edition. I took it to a WD certified place which was asking for 1200$ to recover. I got my drive back which was nicely opened for me, and Like Pierre was able to connect via SATA port and recover. lets see.. 1200$ or plugging into my PC.. What a F#^%n scam. Im wondering if I would be able to use another HD enclosure and get the drive portable again.
I have tried for 2 weeks to get MyWorld book 500GB to work without computer server as it say in the adds:
“Share and access your data anywhere, anytime, even when your local computer is off”.
I try to read movies and mp3 from this drive directly to media player but it will not see My Book.
Now the “funny” part, I try to get email support from WD, they reply I have press reply to their email and to put my question below a line and above another line that is indicated in their email. I have done this for two week now And I get the same reply again and again. Has anyone else seen this or is it just my email program, I don’t use Outlook express.
I have been here: http://martin.hinner.info/
to try to get into MyBook but no succes, MyBook will reply that there is no new firmware.
So, anyone got a reply from WD suport?
Anyone got the firmware from Martin to upgrade you Book?
Uffe
Mine works fine, it’s just that the lights don’t do what they are supposed to do. On the outside of the box it states that Retrospect will allow you to get the “blue circular” lights to show you how much space you have left. The drive works great, but the lights seem to do totally random things. Any ideas.
I have a my Book 320 - - worked great for a month or two and then started to dismount on its own. It makes a clicking sound and now will not spin up or mount at all.
Emailed support - they want me to use some software to obtain the serial number. Probably they didn’t read that the drive doesn’t spin up. The Serial number on my drive’s tag is actually the model number. THERE IS NO S/N on this unit! I hope they are going to take care of me. I have had good luck with WD internal drives, but not with this external unit.
I have had many WD drives and had frew problems but my WD My Book Pro 500GB drive was a real disappointment. The capacity gauge feature did not work under USB and only worked under Firewire if the drive was connected after the PC was booted.
Tried a firmware upgrade designed to fix a “FireWire Unique Identifier” problem in hopes it might also fix my problem. The upgrade aborted and corrupted the flash memory turning the drive into a brick.
WD issued RMA to replace it with refurbished drive even though their firmware update screwed up the drive!
To open a Western Digital My Book, try this (pretty pictures included):
Looks like more trouble than it is worth.
http://rebootdaily.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-open-western-digital-my-book.html
If You can see the drive in Device Manager give Testdisk a try.
Look for ‘TestDisk and Live rescue cd’ more then half way down the page. I used partedmagic live cd on a friends wd external drive -essential 160 gig My (lost) Book- Testdisk is included…it has saved a couple drives for me
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd
http://www.partedmagic.com/
Hi friends,
Writing you from Switzerland, about My Book troubleshootings !
I bought a My book world one month ago and just after transfering all my families photos on it, it sucks.
Was so upset, I was ready to crush it on the wall.
After a few minutes of zen attitude, I start to open it to put the HD inside my computer to recover datas. After pulling it outside the plastic cover, I try it on my desk and surprise, it works perfectly. So I think that maybe it heats to much inside the Book type plastic cover. Or connectors touchs themselves when combined inside the plastic cover.
Now, this hard disk leave on my desk, opened and refreshed.
Just thinking about a solution to put it into a wood box, cooled by a vent cooler.
Just hope it will help some of you recovering at least their datas. Sure I lost my waranty but I will never by again a WD hard disk, whatever is their solution.
See you all
Freddy
@Louise
A WD Mybook needs (usb)energie for good data transfer: if your usb-hub is not powerfull enough, data transfer will stop or mailfuntion. Disconnect some other usb products untill your drive works again. This is also the case for Firewire…
Most of the external HDD’s are getting too hot, because we consumers want little small boxes…
Tape a big fan to the site of your WD Mybook and your drive will be much cooler and quiet; the internal fan will not work at all because the limet is not reacht.
Bought one 4 months ago and it’s already dead! DO NOT Waste your money on these cheap drives!
Nikos D — thanks!!!! You just saved me a lot of trouble and heartache with the suggestion to plug the power cable in *after* the USB cable. My computer wasn’t recognizing the drive (prompting for drivers) either until I tried that fix, although it was working fine the last time I plugged it in, and fine on the firewire connection as well. Still, it makes me nervous, and I think I am going to get started on some DVD backups.
Thanks again,
Karena
I bought a WD MyBook 250GB about 10 days ago. I got it off cheap and a friend of mine recommended it on the basis that his MyBook had worked fine. Ok, I bought that thing and transferred around 130GB of data to it. Used it very little between then and now, playing one or two media files from the drive every day. Ok, so this morning the drive works fine, when I come home at 8 PM the piece of shit is shot. Wont start, wont do jack or crap.
Taking it back tomorrow or the day after that and hoping that I can switch for a Lacie External HD.
“Ok, this must be the most stupid bug ever! After i lost 3-4 hours trying to find where the h#ll are the drivers it’s asking and after trying various stupid things like changing the cable, the port, the orientation of the disk (!) i finally tried one last thing that i thought it was wrong: plug-in the power cable AFTER connecting the drive to the pc. And it worked! :S”
Jesus christ how absurd - I just did this and it fixed my problem where Windows wouldn’t recognise the drive. Add to this further, you just couldn’t switch the drive off by holding the button. Well, thanks for the fix.
Incidentally, I agree about WD. I have recently spent about £3000.00 in recovering data from a failed WD device. It went to 4 globally recognised data recovery experts and they all said the same thing. The drive was using hybrid components from other drives, giving it a strange serial no. suffix. Every single one of these recovery companies said that 80-90% of their returned HD’s were of WD origin.
I shall never buy WD again.
OHHH MY GOD
12-13 hours of fear. Thinking I had lost all….
Nikos “walked” in…
Tell me this isn’t true… Damn what a bug!
hi friend i can feel your pain i also suffer the same problem last two months ago. I have 250GB WD USB Drive suddenly my computer screen is black. My computer rebooted itself automatically and is now sturk in the bootup process with a message similar to this. After than withouot waste of my time i took my hard drive into the hdrc recovery centre for testing. After testing they gave me time for recovery, when i check my data i was very happy to see my data. I will never use any software for recovery the hdd. You need this faclities check the website:www.hdrconline.com
Woopeedoooo!!!! Thanks to Cathy she had reminded me of how I ‘accidently’ followed the same instructions and found a solution to the problem below. Thanks to Cathy Again Things is working as they should with MyBookpro 500g
From a happy Yodel
My Book Pro 500g external drive never wants to work on my xp pro laptop and PC.
I have XP Home edition on two other PCs and the My book Pro is recognised and works ok through USB 2 connection.
I had it working on my XP pro PC for a day transferring files onto it in Fat32 format and then learnt that the drive would perhaps work better formatted as NTF but having done so still can not get it recognised on my XP Pro PC and lap top. Have reformatted my XP pro PC in the hope that the ex drive would be recognised on a clean XP pro PC but it refuses to do so. Has anyone got an easy answer. It worked for awhile but not any more. Disappointed and frustrated
Yodel
Well, here’s my horror story. I bought a brand new MyBook 500GB (the new ones that only have a USB 2.0 port - no FW) on ebay last month. It was working perfectly - until Today.
I had my iTunes library on it becuase it had grown to over 200GB in size b/c TV shows are much bigger than music files.
Today, the power cord got pulled out by accident and the drive dissappeared from my desktop. I restarted the computer but the drive wouldn’t show up. Then I realized that, even though the light in the front was on,, the drive was not running. I didn’t know that pulling a power cord out could permanantly stop a hard drive from spinning. At first, I thought that I had damaged the electrical panel in the drive, so I bought a new enclosure at Staples and dissected the MyBook. It didn’t run in the new enclosure either. So, no refund from WD is expected since all I have left is the drive itself which appears to be VERY dead. Luckily, iTunes is allowing me to download all of my stuff again….several hundred (if not thousand) dollars worth of music, tv, and movies. If they didn’t do this, I would have flipped out on WD.
Lesson learned….stay away from WD. I don’t care if everyone else is the world LOVES WD. The point is, WD failed ME. That is all that matters.
@Yodel
You said: “My Book Pro 500g external drive never wants to work on my xp pro laptop and PC”.
Is your USB conection powerfull enough?
Your MY BOOK drive needs power for a good working USB-connection. If that’s the case try to connect an external USB-hub with power adaptor! to your laptop or PC, maybe this solves the problem.
@ Sandy
Verry sorry for your loss Sandy
I think maybe your drive died because it was accidently shaken. Sudden loss of power will not damage a harddrive; (data will be loss but nothing else).
All brands of harddrives are extremly sensitive for movement when the are working = (reading/writing).
Compare a harddrive with an old grammafoon; one shake can be enough for damage to the drive.
I agree with the above participant because i also recoverd my data in same condition. Last monday i shut down my system properly but next day i saw my hard drive making sound fastly. Then one of my friends sugges me you took with your HDD into HDRC. When i reach their and share about my problem,they give some time for testing and reacovery. Next day when i check my data i shock its absouteley fine. I share my thoughts because i got woderful company for recovery. For physical and logical problem any type please check the http://www.hdrconline.com. They have very efficient tools to rebuild the data.
best regards,
add me to the list of very unhappy WD owners . i go ta 500g my book ….moved EVERYTHING over to it . and then it died . first the light started blinking , but the drive wouldn’t work or even show up . then rebooted the computer adn rehooked up drive …now nothing , it won’t even power up !!!! i guess it would have been easier to just delete everything i really wanted to save some time . by teh way , the drive is less than a month old ….it seems like companies are trying to make stuff cheaper rather than better !!!!
Wow, I just got a WD MyBook Pro for my birthday!
I am assuming that the pro bit is short for problematic piece of crap. Put on my files (fortunately it broke before I formatted my old hard drive,) and now it won’t do anything but blink at me.
I will never buy or reccomend Western digital again.
Does anybody know of a really reliable brand?
I have just bought my third MyBook Premium 500 GB
since one year (a bargain at Costco).
In spite of some adaptation problems at the beginning (I am
Macintosh), and a ridiculous technical service, I am now fully satisfied with these units and I always consider that they offer the best quality/price ratio on the market.
I reiterate my comment of last April 19.
Apr 19th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I use two MyBook Premium 500 GB. I appreciate them very much and I don’t have any problem, except for a particular case which I already explained (03/08/2007). And the support service seems really poor.
I find normal to meet a certain percentage of dissatisfaction for any product. And, of course, a hard disk is a particularly delicate component. I heard horrors about all brands of hard disks. The title of the blog could be changed for:
“Any drive name†sucks!
The result would be probably the same one.
I think that the majority of the encountered problems are due to one of the following causes:
- The user did not read to the first line of the manual. Thus, we learn that the My Book Pro II is preformatted for Macintosh, which is very exceptional and, in my case, I am charmed by it).
- The disc was subjected to bad handling (Software or physical).
- The unit, unfortunately, is within a certain acceptable percentage of defective product.
Beside that, I believe that there are thousands of very satisfied users.
I still have confidence with WD products, and I consider, despite everything, acquiring soon a MyBook Pro Edition II (1 TB). It offers, in my opinion, the best quality/price ratio and comes with a three years guarantee.
My year old western digital 120 gb passport stopped working, and drive is not recognized by windows xp. When I plug it into the usb windows tells me new device found but it can not installl. If I plug it onto another computer, I get the same results. I guess the drive has died.It no
@James
Try a Seagate HDD
Barracuda ES.2 SAS 3.0-Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=barracuda-es-2-sas-3-0-gb/s-500-gb-hard-drive-st3500620ss&vgnextoid=89dec27bebb43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=b655f141e7f43110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&reqPage=Model
@James
And for I forget it:
Please don’t put your HDD in a little small external casing! because it is getting too hot!
The best temperature for a starting or working HDD is between 15 and 40 degrees centigrade, and the best position for a HDD is horizontal.
If you use an external drive connect it with Firewire; Firewire keeps your HDD cooler and takes less CPU power to operate.
I also own a WD 1TB external dual option premium drive which I purchased last year. The firewire connection never worked right. Sometimes the drive would show up in windows XP and other times after a reboot it would disappear. I recently flashed new firmware on it hoping it would solve this problem but no luck. Maybe its not compatible with my firewire chipset which is Texas Instrument chip on an Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard.
USB seems to be working fine, but I got this drive because I wanted a firewire device. Anyone with a similar experience or solution please reply.
Model #: WD1000C033
Thanks.
Hey David,
The WD 1TB external dual option premium II drive needs a lot of Firewire power from the Firewire hub, if the (external) hub is not powerfull enough you gone get strange malfunctions.
See this list of posibble solutions (the order off the list is random):
1)
Take an internal Firewire hub with a seperate power! connection on the Firewire card.
2)
Take an external Firewire hub with a power supply at least 1 amp strong.
3)
Try disconnecting ALL other Firewire useing divices form the hub except you WD drive.
4)
Try this path when your useing (the old, transferrate 30 MB/s) Firewire 400 (1394a)for XP Windows:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a2091337-a0ea-4b34-b19f-b6ec04c1f2d2&DisplayLang=en
5)
Try this path when your useing (the new, transferrate 60 MB/s) Firewire 800 (1394b) for XP Windows:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222/en-us
Note:
If you are know what you are doing… make always a backup if you are working in the Windows XP registery…
For a register-backup; See this this freeware program.
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
Good luck!
DUDE MINE DIED TOO
What a Piece of crap. I threw away the box and the Receipt because I bought it when I was in Arizona. Just got back to California… Plugged in the drive and was copying files via Firefox downloads to my My Book then the system locks up, and when it rebooted the drive is now unreadable on any computer.
I suspect that if I could figure out how to open the god damn piece of shit up I might be able to reformat this pile, but since the thing is only three days old I think it would be better to exchange or get another manufacturers product.
This is probably the tenth drive or product I’ve got from Western Digital that has failed, or not lived up to their claims. I think it is now the LAST one I will have.
I think thw WD My Book drives are Superb!! They are the best in the lot. Ofcourse some may have problems with the drive either because they DONT know how to use the drive or have mishandled the drive.
Western Digital’s products are superior than any. I have used many WD products over the years and have worked without a flaw. My friends use WD drives too and have not complained.
I suggest read the handling instructions FIRST before even trying to use the drive.
Someone commented: “some may have problems with the drive either because they don’t know how to use the
drive or have mishandled the drive.” When I got my WD passport usb external drive, I just plugged it in and my xp computer recognized and I started using it. I made the external drive my storage location for my Itune and my outlook express. It worked fine for about a year and one day xp stopped recognizing the drive. I can hear drive spinning, but I don’t have access to the drive. What did I not know how to use properly in the described procedure above? The passport lived on the table besides the desks When I plug it into another xp computer the drive is not available.
Thanks for any comments, Manny.
Gee, I’ve been opening up and using computers since I was 10 (really) - my first was an old Tandy 1000 desktop. I, too, didn’t know I was stupid and irresponsible with my drive. I’ve only had about 15 - 20 ext. hd’s in my life and this is the only one that failed “Today, the power cord got pulled out by accident and the drive dissappeared from my desktop. I restarted the computer but the drive wouldn’t show up. Then I realized that, even though the light in the front was on,, the drive was not running. I didn’t know that pulling a power cord out could permanantly stop a hard drive from spinning”. TRUE, the power cord DID disconnect while the HD was on my desktop (my dog disconnected the power cord by accident), but the hard drive DIDN’T EVEN MOVE. A HD should die by losing its power source - a power SURGE, sure, but not losing its power thats absolutely ridiculous.
OOPS - Last sentance should read “A HD SHOULDN’T die by losing its power source.
Whoa.. quite a lot of hate towards WD!
I had a similar experience with my MyBook 500GB.. reformatted to NTFS, backup of a lot of data I wasn’t using (Virtual Machines) and about 5 days later it dies.
I’ve had a 80GB WD Passport drive for over three years that works great still today.
The advice is, if it is critical data, back it up in more than one place. If it is your sole storage solution, then only use data you can live without.
@ Sandy
You are absolutely right!
Did you already use the reset-button on the back of your HDD with the power on; to reset the HDD?
Good luck!
@ Mike
The ONLY button on my version was the one on the front. It was the new USB only 500GB MyBook. I disected it, put it in a new case, and it still didn’t work. I ended up buying a Maxtor and have had no problems since.
Oh, I forgot to mention that it, TOO, started working again right after my first post. However, it would start up, (& with my ear against the case) I would hear three clicks and then it would power off. There was no reason for the platter to be hitting the arm - it hadn’t moved. Something must have come loose inside - at least, thats all I can think of.
I bought a WD MyBook 500GB this year, and within two months I figured that no datas can be written to it beyond the 100GB mark. I shipped it back to the factory and got a replacement. However, this does not solve the problem. The adapter that comes with the drive doesn’t even work, I had to use the adapter from my other hard drives. Again, no datas can be written to it beyond the 150GB mark, it gives you error when you try to do that.(you can if you manually copy files to it, but you will have troubles reading those file)
@ James
Go to the FREE utility Hdtune:
http://www.hdtune.com/
click on “download” at the right of your screen;
You see:
File
Setup file (full install)Download and execute the file and follow the instructions hdtune_254.exe
Zip file (no help files) Unzip to a folder of your choice hdtune_254.zip
Install on of the programs.
1) What happens when you perform an (NOT a quick scan) Error Scan?
Is Hdtune also stuck on 150 GB?
2) Disconnect ALL other USB or Firewire products; is the HDD still malfunctioning?
3) Do you use Norton Systemworks?
Disable (temporary) the HDD restore function. Norton reserves a lot of (invisible) HDD space for the restore option and you gone get strange malfunctions.
Mike
@ James
For I forget; Is your drive not getting too hot?; above 50-55 degrees write or read failures can start to happen…
@ Sandy
You said: “There was no reason for the platter to be hitting the arm - it hadn’t moved”.
If your reseller (or UPS/Fedex/Postal guy) dropped the HDD, even 1 feet, the drive is externally not damaged; but if the head(s) even tough the platter(s) the change your HDD will die a few boots later is great. The HDD fluid barring is also very vulnerable.
Mike
Oeps… 1 foot
@ Mike
I totally agree, however, I have never had anything like that happen with any other drive and I’ve gotten some through shipping and some from a store. I just find it odd that this one failed and SOOOO many people have a problem with this line of drive.
I started off with the Western Digital My Book 500GB and found it superb! No faults whatsoever! Then I upgraded to the Pro Edition 2 and you are all 100% right! It would never show up as being connected! I changed it twice, before the store gave me credit and I gave up altogether! I still use my ‘My Book 500′!
Hey Sandy,
The HDD’s you bought, where they external or internal HDD’s ?
I think that Western Digital “dropped the ball†concerning the Western Digital
MyBook Pro Edition II, 1 TB or bigger, because those drive’s (with 2 HDD’s inside) are getting too hot when you are copying more then 100GB at room temperature (20-25 degrees).
I think the 500GB MyBook is also getting too hot, because the external housing is smaller.
(This goes for almost ALL external casings, they are too small for the heat production of a drive larger than 400GB).
The internal fan in the My book (1TB or more) drive is to small to cool the 2 HDD’s efficiently, and the temperature will exceed 55 degrees when you use the USB interface.
And that is when the drive is not boxed in and is placed in a horizontal position… if that’s not the case, the temperature will rise further and the Mybook will die soon. (Approximately 1 or 2 years).
If you want a long life for your (500GB) external HDD (WD Mybook), you can buy a 120 MM fan (a silent case fan) and matching power adapter for 10/15 $, and ducktape the fan to the open side of the external housing.
Maybe it looks strange, but your drive will function for many years and the internal (noisy) (Mybook) fan will not work at all.
If you still want to buy an external HDD, I would suggest an external HDD with a Firewire 400, 800 or eSATA connection if possible.
And if the drive is 10 degrees hotter than your hand stop copying files and wait until it cools again.
An USB interface takes a lot more CPU power to run and the HDD is getting hotter then when you use a Firewire or eSATA connection.
Greetings,
Mike
Greetings,
Mike
The blog is malfunctioning? I was NOT able to post this reaction in one time?!…
@ Essex Web site designer
Did you already try to remove ALL other USB or Firewire products EXCEPT the Mybook drive and then reboot the PC?
Is your USB or Firewire connection powerfull enough?
This drive needs a lot of USB/Firewire power for a good connection. If not, try a external USB or Firewire hub with an external power source.
Good luck!
@ Mike
I was speaking of only external drives. I’ve only bought 1 internal my whole life (laptop user needed more storage). I had a Mybook 500 so it isnt’ just limited to the Pro edition 1TB . It didn’t run hot as far as I could tell, but I did notice that it NEVER shut off. I use a mac and only shut it off once a week or 2. I need hard drives that I can shut off OR that shut off like they say they will - like when the computer is sleeping. The MyBook was SUPPOSED to do this but never did. Even so, with it running 24/7, it shouldn’t have died in 2 months for no reason. No matter what anyone says, I still blame the company and the brand of drive. I bought a maxtor to replace it and have had no problem. I have a Lacie and AccomData NetDisk as well with no problems. The lacie is EIGHT years old. Granted, I back that whole drive up regularly to the 500GB, but, again, its 8 YEARS old and no problems. The NetDisk is 2 years old, no problems. I think I will continue to avoid anything made by western digital from now on.
Hey Sandy,
The First external drive I bought was a Western Digital… and the drive didn’t even boot up…
In the past Maxtor had a bad name… ALL the 13 Maxtor HDD’s I haven bought are still running!
(I don’t want to promote any brand, because it is depending on the type of HDD you need).
The problem with external (USB or Firewire) drive’s is, that you don’t know what the core temperature of the HDD is, because the SMART function in not working.
You said: “Even so, with it running 24/7, it shouldn’t have died in 2 months for no reasonâ€.
Mhhh, I know WD will never be your pal!, but running a retail HDD (any brand) for weeks 24/7 will give you problems; those retail consumer HDD’s are not constructed for this purpose at all.
Only some special (server) HDD’s are constructed for this purpose, and they cost 50-80% more than the “normal†consumer HDD’s.
Mike
I already have a 1Tb external hdd and bought the 1Tb My Book Pro II last week for back up purpose. (Good job Costco for advertising a 1Tb hdd as a 1To hdd, fooling people eh?).
I wanted to plug it to my NSLU2 (network storage) but I guess i’ll just plug directly to the computer and let it IDLE.
I haven’t had problems with the fan. Its really quiet, can’t hear it. The fan makes a hell of a noise when the unit gets powered up but it only lasts 2 seconds.
One strange behaviour tho is when I boot up my pc and the unit is plugged to it, it gets stuck longer than usual on BIOS splash screen. I haven’t looked in the BIOS settings yet, maybe the USB drive is in the boot sequence, or something like that. Haven’t checked that yet.
Also, I ended up here because sometimes the drive won’t get recognized by WinXP and wanted to see if I was the only one with that problem. Switching ports solves it but it’s a little annoying. That’s all.
Apart from that, it’s all good.
It’s just me or most of the people who have problems with the drive are using firewire rather than USB?
For those who hear repetitive CLICKS, that means physical damage to the drive, probably bad clusters. Wich means you’ll lose your data eventually, soon.
A Maxtor external hdd did this to me two weeks after I bought it.
I bought a 320Gb external Mybook. Unbelievable. Worst purchase ever. Once I realised I’d bought a piece of rubbish, I thought I would at least do the research and see if it was fixable. I think I have spent a total of about 20 hours messing around with this drive trying to get it to work all the time.
The main problem I have is the fact that it goes to sleep, for no reason at all. It’s been suggested that the power supply is not powerful enough and that will cause it to go to sleep. I have yet to get another power supply and try that. A full reboot of the machine, and pulling the power cord out and plugging it back in, generally gets the thing back online, but so far no solution to making it reliable.
I was so pissed off I posted an entry on the wikipedia entry for this drive saying there were technical problems, and referring them to sites showing this. This was promptly changed immediately to take my complaints out.
I’m annoyed enough to go back in and repost my complaint every day, and I suggest that maybe while you are spending hours trying to recover your last data, maybe you would like to do the same
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyBook
I´ve spent some time reading different forums before I went out today and got me a MyBook Pro 500gb. And tonight a happened to find this site.
Hm, I´ve unpacked my new drive, but should I plug into my computer (what if my FW400 cable is faulty)? Or should a take it back to the store and get another one maybe…hmm
i love my wd pure quality firewire if you dont have one get one!!
@ Steve
“The main problem I have is the fact that it goes to sleep, for no reason at all. ”
http://support.wdc.com/
Answer ID 1376
“WD My Book external hard drives will spin down (enter into power saver mode) after 10 minutes of drive inactivity. Once the drive is accessed again, the drive will exit from the power saver mode and spin back up.
Please Note: This is a permanent feature of the external hard drives and cannot be disabled.”
I don’t know if it’s what you mean?
Some people consider that as an advantage,
others like a disadvantage.
@ Rikard
Faulty FireWire cable? Nothing is perfect!
I have also read this blog; I won’t even argue about a faulty Firewire cables… but…
What I do know, is that if you connect too many Firewire products to the motherboard of your computer, some old motherboards had no safety when you overloaded the Firewire hub and it died!!!
If you connect a (USB) or Firewire device to your motherboard: 1 Firewire port is delivering not more then 0.5 ampere (= 500 mA) power for working the device.
If the connected device needs more power you’ve got a problem; the device won’t work or give’s strange malfunctions.
If you connect a new device and it doesn’t work, try to disconnect other devices until it works.
Don’t connect to many devices to 1 (Firewire or USB) motherboard port without a hub with an external power source.
Good luck
Mike
My 500GB Pro edition wouldn’t show up on anything - new iMAC, PPC powerbook G4, laptop running Vista, laptop running XP - then the blue light wouldn’t work either. opening the back up app (managed to install ok before this ‘no show’ problem came up)looked like it was going to back up my data to ANOTHER WD external drive (passport)but when i clicked back-up it said the passport had insufficient space (not true but probably a formatting issue). anyhow to overcome all this all i did was HOLD DOWN THE BUTTON ON FRONT for about a minute, unplug it from computer and from power and wait a few minutes. Then i plugged it back in making sure to plug POWER CABLE IN FIRST BEFORE CONNECTING TO COMPUTER and suddenly it worked as it should. i’m not holding my breath given what others have repor reported here but who’d have thought the order of connections was going to make a difference.
yea, i bought 2: the 320 and the 500 on sale..now i know why.
the 320 went first, and then the 500 which I was using to back it up.
I had to pay a data recovery service 1000$ to get the data…western digital is maybe the worst junk onthe planet.
if you call, 9 times out of ten “all representatives are busy, call again later” is all you get.other times I waited as long as 2 hours on the phone.
they do not respond to email inquiries and they routinely return stuff (did it to me twice) instead of sending replacements
I also bought a WD “My book”. What a piece of crap. It stopped working altogether after I downloaded 375gb worth of movies. It stopped lighting up altogether. Now I am stuck with an expensive piece of crap and Western Digital doesn’t even respond to any of my emails.
Got a WD MyBook 500GB at Costco about a month ago. It was working fine — transferred all my data to it (about 10 years worth of digital photography… and other files) This weekend the drive craps out on me and WindowsXP tells me the drive is not formatted! WTF?! Then I come across this site and fine out it is a common problem?? WTF x 1000!!
Anyone had any luck with 3rd party software recovery tools? I’m trying to see if some demos work before I buy — I will report back here if I find one that works.
UGH! UGH! UGH!
I had my western digital my book 500gb fail on me after 5 months of use. The drive would spin up and make a clicking sound when trying to access it. Luckily I found a software program called HDD Recovery Pro on download.com.The free version showed all my files intact, but I could not access them normally. Well I had some very important information on the drive so I bought the program for $140 and recovered everything off the piece of junk wd drive. Now I have learned to back up important information on two sources. I am going to try a new maxtor onetouch 4 drive because they come with a 5 year warranty. Good luck to everyone in retrieving their information off the wd drives. I am never buying another junk western digital drive again.
Still working on trying to save my data off my drive myself. I will report back here if I am successful.
In the meantime, I pinged one of the companies that was listed under Western Digital as partner for data recovery — the one to use if you don’t want to void your warranty. Do they think I give a rat’s A$$ whether or not I void my warranty at this point?! (I’m the one with the one month old MyBook 500 Gb that just lost 10 years worth of digital photos and data!!!!!) Anyway, they quoted me $500 - $1750 over the phone .. and I’d have to send my drive in.
Western Digital has lost a customer for life. I’m very surprised there isn’t a class action lawsuit over these failures that WD refuses to cover.
@ Tina
Did you already try to connect the WD HDD into a (IDE) motherboard connection of an other (or your own) PC?
Remove the WD drive out of it’s casing and try to connect it to a IDE interface on your motherboard.
If you don’t know how to do this exactly, don’t try this, because you can lose all your data!
Don’t copy any data to the HDD, just read date, and try to copy it to an internal drive.
For all:
An external drive (ALL BRANDS!) is NOT the solution for copying hundreds of GB at the same time!; the cooling of the drive’s is NOT sufficient for this purpose!
Copy files for a 30 minutes and then let the drive cool off for 15 minutes.
For the WD HDD: Place the drive always Horizontally, don’t block openings, keep the WD HDD clear of all objects (for 50 centimeters) that can block airflow.
Operating temperature for a HDD is 25-45 degrees Celsius; above 50 degrees Celsius, a HDD can malfunction (or dies within a few months) and store your date incorrectly!
If you want to be save!: ducktape a 12 centimeter casefan to the side of the WD HDD, and your cooling problems are over.
If you can’t lose any important data; back it up on two different HDD’s
And don’t use two RAID 0 HDD’s !
If your motherboard dies, an other motherboard will probably not be able to read your data!
Oeps…
just read date = just read data
My WD 320Gb drive stopped working when I connected into my usb hub. The warranty had just ended. Bummer. It powered up when I connected the usb cable but the drive could not be seen. I tried to connect it to several other computers with no luck. Hence I ripped its guts out and did the SATA connection thingy on a computer at work. Still no luck, harddrive doesn’t even show up.
No more WD:s for me thank you
So I bought a Seagate 500GB external hard drive, and it works great. Western Digital is really a piece of junk, and I’ll never buy from them again. First, their customer service is horrible. The day I got my hard drive replacement, I was so happy I finally got a new drive that will probably work, until I opened the box, connected the cables and found out that the thing was dead. No sounds of spinning, the green light was off, I was starting to think that they gave me the wrong drive which is supposed to be thrown away; however, I figured that I should try using another adapter because it maybe the case that the adapter is broken. So I use the adapter from my one other external drive and plug it in my newly arrived replacement drive, magically the hard drive started to work, I concluded that it was not the problem with the hard drive but the problem withe the adapter. They packaged the hard drive so carelessly that they put a broken adapter with it. Second, WD is never compatible with other brands of hard drives. You cannot have WD and other brands of hard drives running on the same computer at the same time. I have Maxtor and Seagate, they both will not recognized by Windows if I have WD HD already connected to the computer. It makes me think that WD makes its hard drives in a way that it have the ability to disrupt the connectivity of drives of other brands.(Strategy used by WD to increase its market share?) Third, other brands of hard drives have out-performanced WD in terms of price, read/write speed, size of the hard drive, noise generated while running, customer service, and design(physically or visually). You guys like ramen noodls? Well, if ramen noodle is the only kind of food you can afford, then hell yes. But imagine that you can go to Italian restaurants, eat Lo Meins, join barbeque parties and eat sushis for the same price, are you still gonna eat ramen noodles? WD drives are junks not only because their low performances but also because they are surrounded by high performance drives made by other companies. Imagine this scenario. On
a rainy Sunday night, you were sitting in your couch watching your favorite South Park episode, but suddenly you felt that something was wrong. The floor was starting to tremble and the pictures on the wall
were falling down, cracks was starting to appear on the wall and starting to tear the wall into parts. Moments later, your head was full of dust fell from the ceiling. You instinct tells you that there was an earthquake and you immediately hid under the dinning table in the kitchen. Later on, the whole house collapsed; however, you were safe under the table, surrounded by the debris of your house, there was no way out. 12 hours later you felt really hunger and you wanted something to eat. Ah, good thing that the fridge was right next to you and with reach. You opened the door and found a dish of left over
chicken Lo Mein that you bought a month ago. “Oh God, this is the sickest thing I ever done in my life.” you said to yourself as you began eating this delicious Lo Mein. And surprisingly, it tasted good. The thing that I wanted to point out is that no things are useless junks, its relationship with the environment in with it lives
in determines its usefulness. If we compare WD drives with other drives, WD drives can only be junks that we want to discard. Fourth, the WD diagnostics that proclaimed to possess the ability to repair bad sector, monitor drives activities, and prevent loss of datas by giving advanced warning is a joke. I ran the diagnostics twice to repair the bad sector in the hope of at least making the hard drive working like normal again and allow me to write additional datas to it. After it said it had found a dozen bad sectors and got them repair, I believed it and started to copy some files from my older hard drives to WD. Ok, it appeared that the files had been transfered and there were files icons in my WD drive directory. So I deleted the files in my older drive. And it is proved to be the worst thing I’ve done. Whenever I tried to read or copy these files, my whole system froze for a few moment and and error box popped up with a message of Cyclic cylindrical Check. I was like what is that? Then I checked the website and found out that It was an error that indicates bad sectors in my hard drive. God, wasn’t it that WD diagnostics had already taken care of it? As a replay to Mike. The drive was not overheating.
it’s not a problem of my computer, I’ve tried it on different computers. It’s all about bad sectors. If anyone was planning to buy a WD drive, think twice or maybe three times, you may never know that
the file in your folder is actually something that does not exist.
Hey James!,
One thing I know for sure, Western Digital has an overheating problem with its external drive’s!
I’am curious if other brands of external HDD don’t have the same problem…
Did you ever measure the temperature of your external Seagate HDD after copying for 30 minutes?
From four independent HDD’s experts I have been told that if your HDD has only 1 bad sector DON’T “fix†the sector and think your problems are over, but REPLACE the HDD as soon as possible if you love your data!
Greetings,
Mike
Dear Mr. Mike, why would you replace your hard drive if there was a tool that professed having the ability to repair those bad sectors. You know how much effort is involved in just replacing your hard drive? Drawing from my experience. First I had to put everything in a steady box(if you don’t have one, you need to buy one), went to the WD official website and apply for a RMA number, paid $6 for the shipping fee, drove to the nearest local UPS store, paid $4 for a roll of tape. Then I had to wait for about 3 weeks before I got my hard drive replacement. The most frustrating part is, I didn’t even get a new replacement that works. It was one that was probably returned by other customers for defects, and it was shipped right back to me while the defects were not even fixed. So what can we conclude from the irresponsibilities taken by WD? WD just wants to frustrate us, so we will eventually end up getting so tired that we would forget about even having bought the hard drive at the very beginning. Now I have my WD hard drive, at the beginning I was gonna ship it back again for replacement because It was kind of annoying how they do thing so sloppily. A month has passed, I hadn’t even noticed I have a WD hard drive untill I got to post here. Well, time can erase anything, that’s their strategy. For the problem of overheating. Seagate doesn’t not have this problem. The first day I got it, I transfered 100GB of data to it and it did not overheat. The most amazing part is, my Seagate hard drive doesn’t even have any vents on it, compared with the whole ventilation area on top of my WD hard drive. Again, I can only conclude that the drive is inherently ill-engineered. It is like a body infected with diseases, not flus or colds, but AIDS and cancers. You know how serious it is. In conclusion, WD hard drives are so poor engineered that loss of data due to bad sectors and overheating are unavoidable unless you don’t buy WD hard drives, of course.
Mike .. didn’t try physically making the drive an internal. I chose the path of least resistance which was to purchase third party software to recover my data after receiving the quote of “$500 to $1750″ from Western Digital’s data recovery “partner.” I downloaded the Active@File Recovery for Windows trial and it was able to “see” my data but would not let me recover it without paying for the full version. I happily paid the $30 for the full (personal) version and am in the process of recovering my data right now. It looks like it is taking 30 min to 1 hour per Gig of data to recover.
If anyone is interested, check out this website for the software I am using: http://www.file-recovery.net/download.htm
Download the free trial and see if it can at least “see” your data. Then decide if you want to pay for the full version.
As soon as I get all my data back I am returning this POS drive to Costco for a refund.
Btw, I transfered 59 GB worth of data from my old 80 Gig drive to the MyBook 500 GB. It amazes me to think that transferring a “mere” 59 GB could do any sort of damage to sectors. I don’t consider that very much data. Again, I have never had a drive fail on me except for the one that failed after 7 years and that drive was in a laptop that got moved around a lot!
Western Digital customer never again.
Also, I should add that I don’t believe I had an overheating problem either. When I ran the data recovery software on the WD MyBook, I got some error about it finding some severely damaged sectors which would be skipped.
BAD SECTORS. BAD HARDWARE. Western Digital = BAD COMPANY.
Hey Tina,
If your are recovering data, make sure your external WD HDD is not overheating!
A temporary solution is using a (table)ventilator to cool the external HDD.
And keep the temperature in the room where you are recovering the data low.
The BEST working temperature for a (external) HDD is approximately 20 - 30 degrees Celsius (70 – 80 degrees Fahrenheit).
I hope you can restore all your data!
Good luck!!!
Greetings, Mike
If you have no 30$… try this Freeware:
http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?Language=1
@Tina
You said: “It amazes me to think that transferring a “mere†59 GB could do any sort of damage to sectors”.
At the factory they format the HDD… maybe the process was not done properly…
If you buy a new (external) HDD, let Windows format the HDD in the SLOW formatting modus; this is the best option to avoid (later) formatting problems.
If I transfer data to an external HDD, I copy data for 30 minutes and than I wait 10 minutes to let the HDD cool down and resume copying.
With Teracopy you can simply pause the copying process anytime you want and let the HDD cool down!:
You can see what your computer is copying and you can also expand the copying “buffer size†to maximum (turn the slide to the right) so that the heads of your HDD are not used for little bits of data. (You can’t do anything wrong with this slide).
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.asp
The best thing! Teracopy is Freeware!
Greetings, Mike
We had two of four new WD “my book II premium pro 1TB’ fail this summmer.
50% failure rate?? Kinda goes against the label of PREMIUM or PRO!! OF course both these failed after data transfer.
One each on a Mac OSX and WinXP. Yes I used them per the book etc WDraidmanager.
I was so crunched for storage I used them in 1-TB mode, inspite of years of knowing better about not having backups. Luckily it was the controller not the disks. I was able to move the disk pairs to another working case and recopy data back to computers. WHAT pissed me off was WD refusing to replace the faulty products. We returned within the the warranty period wit RMA and they sent back as unrepaired “because I opened the case” to move the disks and save the data.Which was several months of shoooting and editing files. Documentation clearly shows opening the case.
THESE were like <400$ US retail so imagine WD’s actual cost! I really could not beleive thier reputation meant so little to them.
After years of using and recomending WD caviar in digital video editing, I will never never never buy any of thier products again. I have seen rants like this before and now I know why.
The upside is that I recovered the data [2 TB]if not my time and the drives are working fine as additional indiviual internal HDD. two each in both my Mac Pro intel quad and my HP intel quad. The two working cases are now rather expensive mirrored 500gb drives. The faulty raid cases make two stylish if expensive pillars to hold up my monitor bridge. SO IF YOUR DATA HAS ANY VALUE AT ALL, DO NOT TRUST WESTERN DIGITAL. -Richard
I just lost 500gb of data on a less than 6 months ols drive - I posted how I feel about Western Digital…
http://thatisright.blogspot.com
Good Luck,
HMK
Thanks for all the helpful tips, Mike and everyone else here.
As an update, I was able to recover the data using the $30 software I mentioned above. The WD has been on for 5 days straight without a problem — except for the fact that my OS would not recognize that there was any data on the drive — only the recovery software could see (and ultimately, recover) the data.
Good luck to everyone on recovering your data. Feel free to ping me privately if you need some help with the software I used. It took me a little tinkering to figure out (hint: Once you run a Superacan on the drive, which could take a few days, you have to search for all the files and recover your data based on the search list …) My 59 GB took about a week of work (trial and error and wait…) to recover.
Oh, and one more thing ..
F$@& YOU WESTERN DIGITAL!!!!!
@Joel - Thanks for the serial number of the duff FW cable. Didn’t expect plugging in a new device to nearly fry my 2 Maxtors and 2 computers (I thought it was the ID number and tried plugging it into my HTPC on its own). Lucky for me both mobos have a surge detect and shutdown on their FW ports, took me a little while of pooing myself to realise I needed to do a full power down to cycle the ports. Not only could I have lost ~2000GBP of equipment, but I could have lost ~700GB of data which this drive was meant to back up.
Very disappointed in the Windows USB driver controlling in power save functions, I’m relegating this drive off to deal with temporary unimportant data.
I haven’t had my Western Digital My Book for more than 24 hours…I completed my back-up with Leopard’s new time machine. About 8 hours after the back up was completed…My Book won’t even power up. I’ll be lucky to get this back to the Apple store for a return rather than thrown out my *&^#@!$ window.
Had my western digital for 4 months now, it stopped working yesturday. When I plug it in the light around the button blinks on and off, and nothing shows up on my computer. Seeing as I only have a laptop, almost all of my stuff was on that harddrive. It was the 320 GB version of my book. Everything I had is gone now, not to mention the money I spent on it.
My WD Essential Edition is even worst!I dropped it on the floor (a mat one),and it stopped working…..I got a lot of stuffs in there! Do anyone have any idea of how to fix this problem??!!!PLEASE HELP ME! PLEASE!
And when I turned it on,it runs for like a few seconds then it has clicking nosies like 6 of them,then it stop. Then it runs again and it has these clicking nosies again,two of the this time…….Anyone know what is the problem with my WD Essential Edition My Book???Is there a way to fix this?I really want to get my stuffsn back out of that drive.Please can someone find a way to help me solve this probblem?THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,THANK YOU,VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY MUCH if anyone can help me.
Hey Jack,
DON’T turn your HDD on if you don’t know what is wrong with it, because if the heads of the HDD make physical contact with the platters of your HDD the change your data will be LOST for EVER is great!
You can see for example on this site what HDD rescue tools you can buy:… unfortunaly it is very expensive and uncertain if it will work!
http://www.hdrconline.com/
If you can’t afford it, try to buy an exactly the same HDD and try to replace the platters of your old HDD into the new HDD.
Beware!!! This operation is very risky and extremely uncertain!!! This is a last resort if you don’t have the money to rescue your data professionally.
If you have a lot of money and your data is irreplaceable, send your HDD to an (expensive) recovery company…
Good luck!
Mike
When I plugged my wd essential 250gb mybook, xp recognized the device but couldn’t mount it as a drive. I thought something happened to the controller so disassembled the thing and connected it directly to a sata port. A partition manager program told me that a disk was there, but that it was empty. So I tried with Active Partition Recovery and the software recovered the partition table. Now I’m backing up this backup disk, it was a lot of information to have it lost so easyly. I think I won’t trust this thing again. Just for the record, the failure might have been caused by a little variation in power supply.
Absolute shite. The installation CD wouldn’t even work! Sounds like a WWII bomber. Don’t waste an evening trying to get this working, buy something else. Please!
I have a My Book Essential 500GB unit that stopped being recognized by my PC. I saw “My Book (E:)” in the past when I clicked My Computer. When the PC stopped recognizing the drive, I got “Local Disk (E:). Now nothing. After trying different PCs, USB ports etc., I then heard a clicking sound - the dreaded clicking sound per above reports.
WD phone support asked typical connection questions, then suggested an RMA and one of the data recovery partners on the WD site. The standard quote from them is a mid-to-high side of the $500-$2500 range.
Now that I found this blog, I tried HDD Recovery and PC Inspector File Recovery downloads without success. If my PC can’t see the WD drive, how can these apps work?
People say that the most important thing they saved from a house fire was their photos. Now that I just put years of family photos on this drive to back up a failing laptop, my house is burning and I can’t get in.
Other ideas?
Thanks, KG
Tom, re your WD book. I have the 500 gig model and while it works it is erratic. It has lost ist shortcut and icon on the desktop, but I can hunt it down. Just return it and get a different brand. I find that a direct connection to the pc is better than through a hub though. I have two other 500 gig backup drives by Segate and Maxtor and both work flawlessly. Give it back asap.
I am another poor victim of a mybook 500GB western digital hard drive. The hard drive goes click click click click click and then just stops clicking after a while, there is power however no detection. I just sent it to a friend/owner of a shop to fix it for me. But still no news yet.
I was wondering if anyone here has been able to recover data in their hard drive who has a similar diagnosis/symptoms to mine. Thank you very much. What a sad day for all us victims, NEVER EVER another western digital drive.
Just bought the 500 GB essentials edition about a month ago, as with EVERY external drive that I have ever bought pre-enclosed it is throwing errors and crashing randomly, I called tech support and got an Indian guy who spoke extremely broken English and didn’t seems to even understand what Linux was let alone a solution to the problem, so far Linux is the only OS I can run that runs the drive stable and with my six or so hundred movies and no working extended desktop support this really puts a damper in WD’s reputation in my eyes. As for RAID, RAID is a joke I tried that road once and never again will I travel it again, would rather have 2 seperate disks then one unstable one, I think this drive come pre-formatted and because mac supposedly only supports fat32 your looking at making more then a handful of partitions.
@Paul Whelan - I returned the drive and bought a Buffalo TeraStation instead.
The TeraStation is 2tb (1.36tb on RAID 5) and is network connected so it is available to my laptop throughout the house.
I’m delighted with the TeraStation.
Hey Tom,
For you no more Western Digital HDD’s ever!!!?…
A Buffalo TeraStation is using (according to this link)… Western Digital HDD’s
http://www.hardware.info/nl-NL/productdb/bGRkZpibmJrK/viewproduct/Buffalo_TeraStation_Pro/
Mike
Add another unhappy WD customer to the list. I have one of their smaller USB-only (80 GB), and it’s been relatively good, but got a 320 GB MyBook when it was on sale. Lo and behold the wonderful birthday present I received - 3 hours after backing 60 gig worth of movies and music, I plug it in again to discover the shiter won’t turn on.
3
And it’s the same for several models of several brands such as LaCie, Acomdata, Macintosh… And many more.
The Western Digital disks are known for several years, and used by many companies that place them in their own cases or computers.
Problems with the MyBooks, are probably related to the interface, which means the enclosure.
Hi,
I have my WD 500GB hard drive for at least 12 months, it worked perfectly straight out of the box and it’s sometimes left on for 18 hours. I have all my photos, movies and music on it and it’s nearly full. You guys are scaring the shit out of me. I came across this website as I was browsing and looking to upsize but now I’m going straight out to buy another harddrive, then home to put the files back on my PC and then back them up to the new external hard drive!! I might get another one tomorrow just backup the backup of the backup just in case they all explode!
@ Gordon
Good idea Gordon.
All hard drives must be backup, even twice. They are tools very fragile and very vulnerable.
It would be wise to do the first backups by steps to leave the disks cool.
Thereafter, make incremental backups.
The WD My Book does not start when booting, it is stuck in perpetual disk read. Chk chk chk chhhhkkkkkkk…. chk chk chk chhhhkkkkkkk.
The blue light is spinning merrily.
This is after about 6 months after purchase.
Everybody I talked to that was unlucky enough to buy WD My Book has had the same experience. This external drive WILL STOP WORKING AFTER ABOUT 6 MONTHS, if not sooner. It is 100% guaranteed.
Their technical support consists of an indian guy asking you for your credit card number. They obviously must think we are idiots, because we were dumb enough to buy this product in the first place!
There are two kinds of consumers of WD My Book - those who have had it fail on them, and those who owned it for up to a few months. Those who owned it for a few months are the ones who write the glowing superb reviews on amazon and other sites.
Like I said - give it time; after 6-8 months it WILL fail, if not before.
Also this company shipper FIREWIRE cable WHICH WILL DAMAGE/FRY YOUR COMPUTER.
This needs to be repeated.
THIS PRODUCT MAY DESTROY YOUR PC.
This is unacceptable.
An action through lawyers needs to be started - a class action suit.
Hi, concerning the TeraStation or DriveStation, would these be an ideal replacement for the WD-MYBPEII ?? Has anybody had problems with Buffalo products?
I’ve had LaCie (500 GB) and lost data and the works as mentioned by everyone here - even though I formatted it in NTFS and used USB, and used the proper unplugging procedures as described by Windows.
I wanted to get a WD-MYBPEII (500 GB) but now I am very hesitant after reading these horror stories. However, so far (cross fingers, knock wood, etc…) none of the above has happened to me with my WD 250 MyBooks (and I have 2 of them; formatted as NTFS; using all the proper procedures for plugging and removing them from the computer; it has been over 1 year now).
I want to upsize (running out of room), but now I don’t know which brand. This is the first time I hear of Buffalo products…any info is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
RE: fail or work for a few months, I bought a MyBook this summer and had it fail off the bat. Then I got an RMA and the second one worked for a few months before failing. As soon as I bite the bullet on the couple grand to recover my data - this was to be THE backup while I rebuilt a PC - I’m going to look into robust virtual storage. Any suggestions on providers?
I guess the best thing to do is buy a cheapo PC desktop with a big harddrive. Once the main PC croaks, buy a new one and copy stuff over from the backup PC.
I recently purchased a My Book for a client who has a large amount of my work to file. It became the off site backup for the project, and, other than the caveat about formatting, it so far works fine.
But, and a big one, she doesn’t run it all the time, so I don’t know if it will be as robust as I hoped it would be.
I am surprised at all the WD failures mentioned here. I had the same problems with Maxtor. In fact, a Maxtor and a WD on the same controller was/is a no-no. Since I had subsequent failures with Maxtors, I got rid of them and switched to Seagate. I don’t remember why Seagate over WD, but so far, Seagate and WD seem to be functioning fine.
I bought a 500gb Western digital essential edition hard drive.. put everything i wanted on it,, got it filled up with 400 gigs of my most important data, reformatted my computer ( the reason i got the removable drive ) restored about half the stuff i wanted off my western digital drive… 2 weeks later the drive is toast. Dont make the same mistake i did.. do not buy western digital
I confirm. WD My Book Pro Edition II sucks.
Even with the firmware update the fans are really audible. If you plan to place the drive in a sparate room why not but still…
I don’t understand how WD manage to manufacture such a shity product. .. I would be ready to pay 10$ more to have a better fan… and for mass production, I am sure WD should be able to negociate good prices for better fans…
Another detail, during the install tests, I did “Remove Drive” from the WD Button soft and once reconnected the drive was not recognized and I had to reformat!!!!
Can’t believe… Don’t buy!!!
To Costco, 1TB Mybook is now affordable, buy, format as Linux partition
as expected, mount but don’t immediately put into service.
Next day, buy two more for a friend… but one is DOA … take it back and get another, just bad luck I figured. 4th drive is formatted but
the USB disconnects intermittently. Then I found this blog.
Oh no, these things are crap! Took 4th drive back.
Meanwhile copied 250G of files to first drive… no problem, but wait
when I read it back the USB is now dropping out, sometimes remounts
automatically, sometimes not.
Desparately copy files off first drive…. took 10 attempts but got
it all safely so I don’t think its the hard disk, just the USB ifce.
Return first drive to Costco, return second drive since I don’t want
to deal with these things anymore.
Guy at returns counter recognizes me and checks computer.
“You’ve returned a few of these”, he says. Yes I mutter.
“I think you should stop buying them”, he says. I agree.
“We haven’t had too many of these returned”. I tell him
about this blog but his eyes glaze over.
As I’m driving away I think, yeah, when I tried it on Windows
the USB would drop out a reconnect annoyingly but most of the
errors were hidden. Most customers would be using Windows.
On Linux the logfiles revealed the nasty truth about the
USB ifce on these beasts.
4X4
Almost year of WD experience… Thanks to all, it reminds me that WD is not a good choice. Will not buy.
Okay, already placed order when I came upon this site. Got really scared. So, having read all the comments, the first thing I did was connect USB cable to laptop first, then power cord. Then I reformatted for Windows. Then I loaded fan firmware upgrade. Then I stuck four wonderful little rubber feet from Lowe’s on the MyBook Pro Edition II’s bottom (determined to always position in vertically).
No problems. No failures. No noise. Three days and counting. We shall see …
Sorry. Forgot to mention that I also configured for RAID 2. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Almost bought one of these at Costco today. Ugh. Good thing I didn’t, was really disappointed though since it was such an affordable price.
If you want an external drive, buy an enclosure and buy a Seagate Barracuda and plug it in there.
My Mybook (500GB) failed within one month. After opening it, and putting the SATA hard drive in a different case, it still wouldn’t spin and shop told me it was dead. FUCK WESTERN DIGITAL! I lost 50 hours (a total of 3 years) worth of field recordings… and I was about to back them up when it failed. Save yourself the headache! Don’t buy Western Digital!!
Hey man,
I have had this WD MyBook (250G) for 6 months or so and I hated it when I first got it and didn’t play well with my Apple with firewire and I had to use USB, and now I had it running and everything on it just vanished. One minute it was there (150G of photos, music, video, backup data, etc.), the next there was nothing there and 250G free. What. The. Hell.
Some of it only existed on that drive (bad idea, I know), and I’m ripped. Did this post ever result in any bright ideas for recovering data from one of these incredibly unreliable machines?
Any info you have would be MUCH appreciated…
Cheers,
Nathan
I bought 2 months ago a WD My Book 500gb and it simply worked immediately and perfectly on my macbook just after plugging it on. It’s perfect,nothing to complain about it.
So far so good, I got a second hand My Book World Edition 2 1TB off ebay but with warranty.
Some people on here who have the same edition as me and realise its a USB-A connection but don’t seem to realise it is DEDICATED for adding more external HDD’s to the My Book, NOT for connecting it to a pc… No wonder you cant connect to it…..
Ok my one concern is the write speed for small files, as it seems to take a hell of a long time to copy over 200gig of music, addmitedly the computer sending the music is only on a 100MBit Lan and not Gigabit.
Well. I have bought 1TB My Book Home recently. When I connected it to PC, nothing happened. Anytime I try to connect it, by USB or FireWire, nothing happens. I wanted to go to claim the drive and get the same type again, but after reading these comments, I am not sure if I want the same product again. Maybe I will go with Seagate. Anyone having problems with Seagate external drives? I would like to know.
I have had WD 500 Essential external hard drive for about 6 months now. Yesterday I noticed I was having problems accessing the drive, very long delays and broken video playback. Pretty soon it locked up my computer. I disconnected it and my computer works fine but it won’t recognize the drive. It just clicks a few times and nothing else. It is a piece of S*&T. Unfortunately, I found this blog after it happened. I’ve lost all my data. I’ll try opening the box and reconnect via sata. We’ll see if it works.
I wonder if Western Digital uses it’s own drives for it’s company data. Probably not. If they did they’d be out of business.
thnx guys, i just saved a lot of money…
i decided to buy a:
Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive
Key Features and Benefits
* SATA 3Gb/s interface
* Perpendicular recording technology for maximum drive capacity and reliability
* 16-MB cache buffer
* Ultra-fast performance
* Superb reliability
* Whisper-quiet operation
* Enhanced G-Force Protection against handling damage
* 78 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate
* Clean Sweep calibration and Directed Offline scan diagnostics
* RoHS (restriction of hazardous substances) compliant
* 5-year warranty
Applications
* Mainstream PCs
* Performance PCs
* Gaming PCs
* Workstations
* Desktop RAID
* Personal external storage devices
Brian,
Another post reported that opening the case voided the warranty. I’d like to know your success on opening and connecting via sata. Maybe cheaper than $2000 by recovery service? Like I’d want a replacement anyway…
KG
Another choice.
I just bought two LaCie Big Disk Extreme + 1TB.
Wonderful!
USB 2.0, Firewire 400, & Firewire 800
Solid construction; Energy effecient.
Aluminum body, cooled by heat dissipation and a very quiet, practically silent internal fan.
A super bargain at Future Shop (Canada).
Previously, I bought three WD MyBook Premieum 500 GB since 9 months. Fairly satisfied, despite some minor problems, and lately, a crash on the oldest disc (aged 9 months). But, everything has returned to normal after a system restart.
LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ 1TB
2 x FireWire 800 (9-pin) ports
1 x FireWire 400 (6-pin) port (compatible with iLink, DV)
1 x USB 2.0 port (compatible with USB 1.1
Rotational Speed (rpm)Â : 7200
Cache : 32MB
Interface Transfer Rate :Â
FireWire 800: up to 800Mbits/s (100MB/s)
FireWire 400: up to 400Mbits/s (50MB/s)
USB 2.0: up to 480Mbits/s (60MB/s)
Average Seek Time (Write)Â :Â <10ms
Cooling System : Thermo-regulated progressive quiet fan
Size : 1.7 x 6.8 x 10.6 in. / 44 x 173 x 272 mm
Weight : 5.51 lbs / 2500 g
Triple Power Management : ”Auto” for energy efficiency, “On” for instant access, “Off” for data protection
3 Year Limited Warranty
I bought a WD My Book -500 GB .It Worked fine for 3 months.
Now it is getting Power and even i am hearing the Running sound when you touch the HD.
But,It is not detecting in the computer.
Can anyone advice in this????
I guess I am just another pissed off customer. My revenge will be when Google puts out its online storage solution, then physical external hard drives will be museum pieces and Western Digital can simply disappear. I bought an Ibook of 500 Gigs which decided to stop working. And frankly, the larger the storage capability the larger the liability. I just lost all my data, once I trusted this piece of shit as my storage place
I too got royally effed on the WD 500 on WinXP Pro. One solid week and it fails to start up. Cause horrific nightmares for me to figure out what was making my computer act like a massive pos out of nowhere until I finally figured out exactly which pos was causing it. ALL of my western digital HDs over the years have at best paled in comparison to other name brands, and I’m done with them.
I’ve had a Maxtor External 200GB on my Mac G4 for about 5 yrs now and the thing’s still working perfectly. This all fits into my theory that China is trying to either poison the rest of the world, or drive us insane with their cheap garbage products that are failing every 10 mins, and when we’re all weakest they can invade.
Western Digital sucks whale ninnie lickers and I want to kick their pants off!
A bit of advice for anybody coming here because they have problems with their Mybook drive (as I did). I had the exact same problem that Mr. Raftery describes in this blog post, and I managed to fix it. On the back of some (all?) mybook drives, there is a button which is poorly made. In my case the button was not moveable at all, and I began wondering if it was in fact a button to pop the case off the drive.. So I pushed it with as much force as I could (more than I would normally ever apply to electronics), and after doing so 4-5 times, I noticed the button was now loose. I reconnected the drive and it worked. My guess is that the button was stuck in the down position, and that resulted in the problem.
I bought a 500g Mybook Essential in August. It does not have firewire, just USB. I used it successfully on two Win 2000 desktop PCs, one Win XP desktop PC, and one Win XP laptop PC. I copied all my important files to it, but did not delete them from anywhere else. After that I used it mainly to keep files synchronized when working in different places. I last used it a week ago.
Today I tried to use it and it was not recognized, either in My Computer, in Management, or in Hardware. The green light comes on when it’s plugged into the USB port, and I can feel it spin up, but it is not accessible in any way.
Different computers, different USB cables, plugging in USB first, plugging in power first– nothing.
Following advice above, I finally opened it up. Fortunately I was able to do that without any physical damage, in case I need to go back to Best Buy and be indignant. Inside i found that it is a Caviar WD5000AAKB IDE drive. Pushing on the cables didn’t help. So next I’m going to try removing them entirely and plugging them back in.
If that doesn’t work, is there any risk of connecting it as an internal IDE?
UPDATE! I was able to remove the drive from the enclosure and connect it directly to the sata cables inside my computer. When I booted up it recognized the drive but no data was accessible. I tried 3 different data recovery programs with no success. My data was lost. I reformatted the drive and left it inside my computer, it seems to be working fine so far. I won’t trust it though and I’m only using as an alternate drive for data transfer.
ARGH I wish I knew this earlier… now I can only join in the mass pain. 2 months… and bye bye… MyBoook XXX is the worst expirience with computer products ever, and I had a lot of bad XP last 10 years. …XL$#@*@!%$
I have a WD passport 160gb and it stoped working so I went and bought anohter one and it does not work either. It’s telling me USB Device does not recognize device.. any ideas ? I havve tried muti computer and muit drives it did work and was working but for some reason now they are not, no drivers were install so none to roll back too!!
Vesna’s comment from September 30th worked for me.
Hold down the power button for 1 minute, disconnect the power and FW cables, then reconnect power, turn the HD on. Plug FW cable back in and it should work.
Mine booted back up fine, and my Time Machine backup mounted fine. After reading all the comments here, I was about to get really pissed, but am glad I found a way to fix it. Just hoping now it doesn’t crap out completely, it’s only 1 month old.
There is a problem with WD drives that they are designed not to work with hard drives of other brands. Try plugging in only your WD hard drives, it should work.
I read this blog for a long time with great interest.
I am the proud owner of several hard drives of several different brands: Western Digital, LaCie, Maxtor, Seagate, Acomdata, Samsung.
They play together nicely and cause me very few worries. Only a few minor problems, which have always been resolved easily.
Maybe the Macintosh world is it less conflicting??
It seems to me that the problems vary from system to system, and the solutions as well.
Good luck to all.
God, I wish I had read all this stuff last winter when I bought the My Book Premium 500GB USB/Firewire drive. I actually bought this drive because I read some glowing reviews. I now believe such reviews (like movie reviews) are bought and paid for. In fact I found this page by Googleing “Western Digital sucksâ€, and this was the first entry.
Here’s my story (forgive my verbosity):
Several years ago I bought a 120 GB Iomega external HD. It’s had its problems. “Delayed Write Failed†errors are not uncommon. Sometimes on boot up, WinXp fails to recognize the device, and I have to reboot again to solve the problem. Then there’s the fan, which, when it kicks in, makes a scary noise. Eventually, I got an old desk fan, set it up to blow on the Iomega, and that keeps the drive cool enough so the internal fan doesn’t need to kick in.
Well, after theses experiences, when I went out to buy a second external HD earlier this year, I wanted to try another brand other than Iomega. After reading the “glowing†My Book reviews, and seeing that Costco had a sale and a coupon, I bought one. Placed it right next to the Iomega, so it could benefit from the cool air from the desk fan. Hooked it up to my Firewire port, and moved the Iomega to another IEEE 1394 port. Since I read recommendations to reformat the drive from FAT32 to NTFS—something I never did with the Iomega—that’s the first thing I did before copying any data to it. When I reformatted the drive, I decided to split it into two partitions: one for all the music and video files I didn’t want clogging my C drive, and the other for backing up important files, like the My Documents folder, from the C drive.
The My Book worked great. I had no complaints. No DWF errors. A few times over the last several months, Windows did fail to recognize the device on boot up, but such occurrences were rare, and were solved by simply powering down, unplugging the power cord from the My Book, plugging it back in and rebooting.
I was so happy with the way the drive was working, that I decided to unclutter my almost full Iomega drive by moving most of my important files to the My Book. A few months after using the My Book, WD sent me an e-mail telling me the Firewire cable needed to be replaced. I never had a problem, but I figured “Why take a chance? If they are gonna send me a new cable for free, I might as well take them up on the offer.†It took almost a month after I filled out the form for a new cable for them to ship it to me. I should have taken this as I sign. But I didn’t. After all, I’d had nothing but good luck with the My Book.
Then my luck ran out.
At the end of October my Dell PC wouldn’t boot up. When all was said and done, I was forced revert the C drive back the “Dell Partitionâ€, which reset my PC back to the way it came from the factory, thus wiping everything I had on my PC. However, I felt secure in the knowledge that everything would be fine, because all my important docs—my photos, my artwork, my Word and InDesign files—were backed up on the My Book. In fact, I had just done a backup the day before my PC went to hell.
Here’s where I made mistake. I took my ol’ sweet time restoring the backed up files back to my C drive. Prior to the PC crash, My Documents folder was a disorganized mess. I decided to restore the backs up slowly, so as to better organize my files. Since I was busy with other things, including reinstalling all my programs, plus other non-PC related chores, this took a while. Besides, I figured “What’s the rush? Everything is backed up on the My Book.â€
HA!
Then last week my world came crashing down. While backing up a few files to the My Book, I encountered my first DWF error with that drive. I did what I do whenever I encounter such a problem with the Iomega. I shut everything down, rebooted, and deleted the file which not did complete during the back up. Everything seemed fine.
Then, the very next day, I boot up, and to my horror, the My Book fails, perhaps for good. It made a few clicking noises while Windows tried to find the drives. The device itself was detected, but I could not find either partition listed either in My Computer or Disk Management. I could not access the partitions or the files on them in any way I know how.
Tried plugging it in through the USB port. Same situation. Brought it over to a friend’s house and plugged into the USB port on his PC. Still no change.
I was going to call tech support, but I read horror stories about that, so I tried to find my own solutions.
Tried Easeus PTDD. It found the drive, but not the partitions. It was listed as “0 bytes†or something to that effect. Any operation I tried on the drive gave me an “I/O failed†error. Now, I’m trying Easeus Data Recovery Wizard Pro. Went to the Partition Recovery option. The WD drive was listed, but with a false capacity of 2047GB. Ran a Quick Scan before I went to bed, but when I woke up, the progress barely moved (about a millimeter) and nothing had yet been found. Then I decided to try the “Intelligent Scan†option. The scan has now been running for about five days. In that time, the progress bar has moved less than a quarter of an inch, and no files of folders have yet to been listed as found.
I am seriously bummed. At this point, I don’t give a damn about the drive. My main concern is getting all my data back. We are talking several years of hard work here. We are talking data that is very precious to me.
I’ve read about several problems with several different My Book models, and have seen several solutions posted. Quite frankly, I’m totally confused over which is the right road to take. HELLLLLLLLPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!
Oh, and I’ll sign up for any class action lawsuit. Hell, why stop at WD? I can think of several computer hardware and software companies which are screwing over the consumer with faulty or defective product and piss-poor to non-existent tech-support. You’ve got to say, “I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My time, money spent, and data lost has VALUE!†So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your computer chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!†And as you they cart you off to the loony bin, tell the men in the white coats, “Western Digital made me do it!â€
…actually, I got really worried reading all the comments, I bought the My Book World 1 TB last week in USA and brought it to europe, so I guessed I can’t return it and be stuck with a pretty bad thing. However, connecting to my router, not even bothering with the stupid MioNet, just ping’ed ‘//MyBookWorld’ gave me the IP, entering IP in browser gave access to the setup program - and all went fine from here, mapping network drives to Win XP based on IP and shares created in setup program. I don’t even want to write what I think about this Mio crap, but if you go straight at the device using browser or windows, it actually isn’t as bad as I read it would be. There actually is almost no noise at all, and I have to say I can’t really evaluate on the speed, as my notebook is on wireless and hard to say how much is drive performance and how much wireless. A Gig files to copy there takes about 5 minutes - which isn’t exciting, but not all that bad. Having 5 sessions copying data to it, you still can browse files fine in explorer. So in summary - maybe not the very best buy ever, I do miss some things (direct USB, ..), but could have been worse. I’ll stick with it, I guess, but will always stay far away from “services” like Mio.
I just bought one of the 750 gig My Book Essential Edition externals, before reading all these comments, of course. A am however encouraged in that I have not found anyone here who has had the 750 essential with usb fail on them while using it with a pc, not a mac. To me this says a lot about this particular model at least, considering a majority of the people here found this page because they had a problem with there HDD. I think ill hold on to mine for a little while at least. My original plan was that if I didn’t have any problems with this HDD before the warenty expiress then I will buy another identical one and use RAID1 with them. Until that time I am not trusting any data that either is not backed up or has any importance to this drive.
I’m pretty hard on drives too, Ill probably be downloading directly to this drive using bittorrent, which I guess is rather hard on them because you are constantly reading and writing to it. So if you don’t here back form me it means that this drive has survives my torture test. Any other outcome and I will likely be back here, another dissatisfied customer.
Also, iv owned a 160 gig passport for about 5 months and have had no problems, and i have a friend who owns the same model and he has had his for much longer, also with no issues.
I have bought a my book2 studio edition 1tb a few days ago. I don’t read about any problems with the studio edition here, so i hope everything will be ok.
I have been using WD disks for several years and always been happy. Before that i had Maxtor and those crapped out on me.
Dude … you ‘work’ on a Mac ??
Mr Big:
Ugh, YOU work on a PC?!? Of course you can WORK on a Mac. Not only do you have almost EVERY PC app avail for mac now, you can also RUN WINDOWS ON A MAC (not emulate, but actually install and boot from). That includes ALL WINDOWS APPS. I homestly don’t know why people buy Pieces of Crap anymore. Just buy a mac and run windows on it. Its actually a proven fact that Macs are actally cheaper when compared to a similar PC machine AND Vista runs FASTER on a Mac. SO, point is, YES people actaylly work on a mac - MUCH FASTER AND MORE EFFICIENTLY than windows users.
Happy Holidays@
Well put Sandy…. I’ve been saying this for years
No more WD for me! Their robo-tron tech support at $15US sucks. Had a 500G Premium (Costco). Worked fine on my work PC for over a year. Beginning of this month, PC stops recognizing it. Blue light stays on. I try all the normal steps — replace cable, try plugging into different USB ports, try “find hardware” utility, try seeing if any other PC at work can see the drive. Nada. At home I have a PC running a 320G My Book from Costco(with a green light and no power button). While the “green light” My Book is running, I swop it out w/ the blue light My Book from work. Lo and behold, my work data is there. The only PC in my world that can “see” my work My Book, is the home PC. Swop green one back — no problem. Did this several times. Tried WD “Stop spin” utility on the blue light My Book once I get the home PC to see it, then try to see it at work — nothing. Try “button manager” utility from WD — no help. I bite the bullet and call WD’s off-shore tech support (at $15US because warranty expired). Spent all of 5 minutes w/ me, telling me to do all the things I did already (new cable, plug directly into wall, etc.) then the robo-tron tech guy says “I am sorry to tell you, you have a port failure.” I say no, my home PC accesses it fine. He then reads the next excuse on his cheat sheet. “I am sorry to you, you have a failing disk. I will connect you to data recovery. Can i help you w/ anything else?” I told him how could he help me w/ anything “else” when he hadn’t helped me w/ this, and hung up. I’ll never by a WD again!
Sorry this saga was so long, but it feels good to be in such good company of WD haters.
My Western Digital of 2 months has stopped working. Only a partial light around the outer ring is blinking. Can someone help.
adc
Yeah, I’ve had a few bummer products that were WD as well….you have to make sure you get a return policy these days on everything.
Brent
Guys, I really feel sorry for you all. If I have problems with my hdd I just take it back to the shop and they replace it.(10 minutes drive from my home) It is a good thing that you can order everything very cheap on the internet, but usually cheap equals crap. I’ve always had wd drives and only one of them was problematic.. however the price was really good
Just received a WD MyBook Home Edition 1TB as a Christmas gift. The drive would not connect to a Macintosh using firewire or USB. I read a post on this blog that the ‘power’ button on the back of the drive needed to be pressed very firmly to loosen it - and then the drive will connect. This advice worked for my drive - after pressing the button labeled with the power symbol (much harder than you would normally press a power button), the drive lights started to flash and the drive connected via USB.
This is the second WD drive (same model) that has had this problem and was fixed with this resolution - looks like a manufacturing/quality control issue.
Just thought I’d share this data in case others are having the same issue. Hopefully this drive has better luck that the others that I’ve read about in this chain.
Anyone know how to fix a WD 500GB My Book that constatly keeps re-booting or re-starting. The dive works but it stops all other processes every time it re-starts. These drives really suck and WD is of no help
Well… i have bought the 1tb studio edition last week, but it won’t work via esata. I try to connect it to an esata silicon image 3132 chipset.. but as soon as i hook the WD drive via esata my computer freezes. Either on boot or in XP. Anyone with the same problems?
I read this on silicon image website:
“If the computer hangs (no display) during booting after installing
the controller card only when a drive is attached, it is usually a
sign of incompatability between the controller BIOS and the drive
firmware. You can often fix this by installing new BIOS for the
controller or updating the firmware on the drive. Instructions for
BIOS update are at SII-TT-0003.pdf document. Your drive maker will
often have firmware updates and installation tools for your drives.”
There is of course no driver or firmware update available.
2 days ago and BEFORE find this blog ive bought 4 2TB WDigital
My Book Pro Edition II (i know i know, lucky me eh!), as many
in here i end up frustrated cause nothing worked.
At first an Unknown USB device error appeared after ive tried
many things for some unknown reason the error disappeared and
in its place took a well known sound indicating that the USB
dive plugged successfully but then again no disk device appeard
in My Computer or in the Manage\Disk Management place.
I want to say here that i have 17 external disks most of them
is Maxtor and Western Digital ones, never had any single problem
even when i connected all of them at the same time.
Right now im very tired and seems the round won by the monster,
i will not gave up, im looking forward to Round 2 and after
that Round 3…etc
May the force be with me otherwise im in deep deep troubles!!!
P.s. The Unknown USB device error probably was the raid controller
i wonder if that is the case why in hell WD didbt gave drivers for it.
I came across this site when googling for possible problems with WD My Book drives. I was about to order a new 1 TB My Book because of a bad experiance I am having with a freshly purchased LaCie drive.
Three weeks ago I got a new LaCie Porsche Design 500 GB drive and though I have been using it sparingly and with all due care, yesterday it begun showing all the signs of failure: clicking sounds, I/O errors, Windows XP Event Viewer populated with “The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad block” error messages, and the disk deep scan indeed unravelled 21 bad blocks scattered all over the disk. All of this just 3 weeks after I got the drive!!
I am really scared I can loose the data I transferred to this new disk from my other drives, and having read similarly scary stories about unreliability of LaCie drives on a blog similar to this one, and written by people swearing never ever to buy another LaCie, I decided to follow the suit and to part company with LaCie forever. Now, after reading equally scary stories about WD My Books on this blog I am really at a loss what to do.
I have had a 500 GB My Book (the one with green light) for more than a year now, and I have to say I hardly had any problems (under Windows and Linux alike, while LaCie’s 500 GB from day one had great deal of trouble to be recognized under Linux).
On the other hand, my first external drive, a 250 GB Maxtor One Touch NEVER EVER was recognized on any computer running any operating system, and after spending countless amount of time trying every idea I read about on the internet I tossed it away. A total lemmon! Forunately, I did not loose any data: simply put it, I never able to put any on it!
Anybody knows RELIABLE external drives?
The wD 500GB external drive (My Book Premium Edition) is a POS! I have had many of the same problem listed above…mainly the drive is only randomly recognized (using XP as OS). Tried all the same things everyone has listed above. I will never ever buy a WD drive again! Hopefully others will read this blog and save themselves the agony we all experienced with this company’s piss poor product design and support.
Wow its amazing how many of you dont know the point of backing up drives. A back up means there are at least two copies wich means you would never lose a file. A drive that is backed then deleted is not backed up anymore the back up is now the primary. Drives fail everyone knows it if you know anything about computers you should never lose a file if you do go back to 7th grade keyboarding class.
@Mariusz
With all these different hardware out there come harder & harder for
someone to find some RELIABLE solution, and things only seem to get
worse…. unfortunately.
I forgot to tell you guy in my previous post that except the 17 truly
external drives (Maxtor & WD) i have 7-8 WD Hard disks with enclosures
with those (the enclosures+WD Hdisks) things are better on the reliable
coast.
It is the FIRST time i have such errors (Unknown USB device) and this
is mainly because there is no drivers for the raid controller they use
and i will be happy (VERY) if someone prove me wrong.
Have a good one everyone.
and thanx for reading me.
It’s been six months since I have posted here. I run Vista Business with a 1 TB My Book Premium Pro at home. One minor issue at the start and none since. A few pointers.
Do not leave the WD drive (or any “retail” drive) on “all the time.” It wastes electricity and is not a good Green IT practice. ALL DRIVES FAIL OVER TIME. It just a matter of when. 1 day, 1 month, or 10 years. How you use a Drive can extend the life of it
.
Make sure (be it Firewire or USB) the drive is connected directly to your dessktop/laptop docking station and NOT through a hub.
If you purchased a new drive for backups (this is any new drive) do not assume it’s going to work right out of the box TEST TEST TEST. This goes with any new hardware you purchase.
As has been mentioned by some of the previous posters here. If you purchase a Drive for backups and you really want to be secure in the knowledge you won’t lose your important stuff Buy TWO at a minimum of any “retail” drive. If you’re paranoid get two separate brands. I personally use the My Book and a Iomega Drive and I have a Separate Media Bay Drive in my Dell Latiude D830 Laptop for daily mail and VFX Shot backups.
When you do a backup USE both drives. The odds of both drives failing at the same time are much much smaller than one.
There are also a number of online Web based backup solutions. If you travel allot and have access to the web explore backing up some of your important stuff to them. Then you can access it anywhere with a decent connection should something happen while you’re “out and about.”
Remember Civvies these are retail products and no two people have the same experiance. I love Dell and Windows but I have never have a serious problem in 15 years that was not resolved to my satisfaction. For example I spilled a cup of tea on my Dell Laptop a couple weeks back. Called Dell Tech Support and they replaced it with a new one no questions asked. You do have to pay for the extra warrenties but it is worth it don’t you think? I also work with Apple and MAC Sofware allot and just remember They have thier problems too…Don’t let the Brand Monkeys and Fanboys have influance over your common sense.
Computers are tools and most all of them break or screwup. I work in VFX with Windows. MAC, and Linux based platforms. These days you have to become smart about what you’re using and how you use it. A few common sense practices will save you allot of heartache. These are not pop up toasters ladies and gentlemen. Please keep this in mind and you will mitigate both your expectations and your heartbreaks with computers as a result..
Good Luck All.
Wiiliam Hazen
I have used the my book on a different esata chipset and it works great now. It is definitely the Silicon Image chipset fucking it up.
Hey Bill,
Don’t you realize that the reason most people purchase these drives is to use them to back up their files. However, what good are they if they fail? Perhaps I should buy a few more of them to back each other up to and so on ad nausem and hope they don’t all go bad at the same time, I guess that would make WD happy…..Duh
Guys most of my internal disks if not all are WD (ive 7-8 of these)
things have a bad habbit to broke no matter if use them or not.
I dont believe WD is a bad company just they messed things up
this time but at some point they will fix things up (or at least i
hope so).
As consern myself ive already tried a different model of My Book 2TB
and worked just fine, tommorow im going to return the rest and i will
demand to give same model as replacement.
Also since i still a believer in WB im going to buy 4 more external
500GB of WD.
Keeping backup of 17 megapixels photos takes space, much space.
Dave Says,
[quote]“Hey Bill,
Don’t you realize that the reason most people purchase these drives is to use them to back up their files. However, what good are they if they fail? Perhaps I should buy a few more of them to back each other up to and so on ad nausem and hope they don’t all go bad at the same time, I guess that would make WD happy…..Duh”[/quote]
Duh Dave…You’re missing the point… You should back up your stuff expecting a Hard Drive/External Hard Drive to Fail and preparing for it because it will happen. I have used a ton of Hardware over the years including Western Digital Hard Drives…It’s been a decade or more since I have lost any data having learned early on what relying on one piece computer hardware for backups will do for you.
Creating a personal backup plan that makes sense and a bit of hardware redundency will resolve 99% of all Data Loss Issues.
William Hazen
from the WD’s custhelp:
Question: Can you connect a WD My Book World Edition or My Book World Edition II to a computer system using the USB port built into the drive?
Answer: The WD My Book World Edition and My Book World Edition II hard drives cannot be connected to a computer using the built in USB ports. These USB ports are designed to connect another USB storage device to the WD My Book World Edition or My Book World Edition II hard drive for access over the network. This device can only be accessed and will only work when connected to a Network (ethernet) connection.
yes dave the point is to have the data in two or more places and you never lose a file
Gosh, i wish i’ve found this page before…
Bought a myBook 500GB Studio Edition on Monday for backing up my Mac Mini (TimeMachine is a great tool :).
After an hour or so, a few tries with USB and FireWire connections on the Mac and my HP Laptop, the drive eventually started working - did my very first backup.
One Backup and 30 min. later (the Mac went to sleep mode), myBook stopped responding. Great.
Brought it back to the store on Wednesday, got a new one.
Connected the new one - after an hour or so it started working etc.
Returned this myBook as well, got my money back.
I still believe that WD makes great drives (had a few of them in the past), but it seems to me that the electronics outside the drive ain’t WD’s core competence.
I’ve (hopefully) solved my issue, just ordered an Iomega MiniMax drive - at least a quick search for “Iomega Minimax sucks” did not return a significant number of hits.
Have been using My Book Pro Edition 1TB problem free for work it’s about 56% full and the only thing I have done to it was place an extra fan on it for cooling…
I did have issue with it not being formatted for windows, and that took a long time.
I guess I’m one of the luck one’s….
I have two my book drives. Both worked for a number of months. For some reason now there is a conflict between the two. If one’s plugged in via USB the other is unrecognizable. Can’t seem to find anything out about why, but thought I’d post. bleh
Guys,
I have bought a My Book Pro Edition II 1Tb and I left with a friend to digitalize all my VHS movies and I can use it connected to my laptop running Windows XP. But when I try to use with my iMac (brand new one, running Leopard), I installed the WD software and when I try to run it it says that the device is faulty and that I should call technical support and I can’t see the drive on the iMac. Anyone could give me a hint on how to proceed?
Thanks,
Julio
Hi there,
I was using the fire wire cable when I had the message that the drive is faulty. Now I’m using the USB cable and the software shows that the drive is healthy, but I can’t see it in the iMac…
Anyone to give me a clue?
Thanks,
Julio
OhhhMyGOOOOOODMyBook Proooooo!!!!!
I had it for about a year edition one I think, 500Gb.
Worked like a charm and two weeks before my final exams I decided I should really back it up… what do you know - just as I plug it into my mac (bookpro 1,1) for the back up it decides not to show up on the desk top. Fan turns.Led on. But it just won’t show up. I tried both USB and FireWire 400. NO GO.
AND THEN I FIND THIS SITE WHILE LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS.
I CAN NOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENIN.
DISTRESS.
I get a kick out of all the posters in this thread suggesting that people don’t know what they are doing blah blah blah….saying not to leave it on etc. Newsflash this product is crap.
I have tried the different plug in sequences no dice. I have used ethernet, firewire, and usb - no dice. I have tried Vista, XP, 2000 and even 98 - no dice. I tried a Mac no dice. I tried updateding the drivers - no dice.
Did I take it apart - no - why should I have to. I’ve already wasted to much time on this product. Why someone should be expected to spend hours troubleshooting a brand new product is beyond me.
I work in IT have for years and have never experienced this before. This product is complete garbage. Brand new - no support - garbage. Did I mention I have 2tb of other drives working? Yes even some other WD drives but the World Book 2 is crap will not produce an image and yes I’ve tried variou formatting utilities - heck they don’t even recognize the drive - so how can they format it? Heck I wish I could leave it on to long or hear how noisy the fan is - kinda hard when it won’t work!!!!
Bottom line there are 320+ posts in this thread with many users experiencing the same problem with no definitive solution. Notice a trend? Maybe the product is garbage? Maybe WD shoud start supporting there products a little better and make sure they aren’t filled with bugs before charging $400 for it.
If anyone from WD is reading this I hope you do something and post some fixes on your website or the WD sucks parade will continue. Can’t be good for business.
Bryan
Poor Bryan…
Good at IT(?) Bad at Statistics…Go to any Product Website, Wiki, or Blog and you’ll find folks that are unhappy with thier gizmo’s. Not saying WD is different or special but they are not any worse…
Nature of the beast…
I have a garage full of junk… everything from MACS/PC’s and Peripherials that have gone POOF! After use…
Getting emotional over your Toaster…External Hardrive…or Plasma TV is a waste of time and energy…
Peace Out….
William Hazen
The good news:
I have 5 WD drives that I’ve bought over the years and they’re still running great, though some of the first ones I bought I’ve out grown. I always backup to two different drives, alternating them and keeping one off-site.
The bad news:
I just received a My Book Home Edition 1TB. I’m running Vista Ultimate. I reformatted the drive for NTFS (took 10hrs) and copied the autorun directory back on to it. The disk seems to work fine once I’m up and running, the problem is that Vista refuses to boot if the disk is plugged in from the start.
Help??
Has anyone run into this? Is there a solution? WD tech support has not been helpful.
Carey
@Carey
Booting problem? Your drive is an USB drive.
Disable in your BIOS the option “USB booting” or similar text.
Your My Book Home Edition 1TB is getting to hot because the internal fan is to smal!
Simple solution: Ducktape a external (12 cm) fan to the site of the My book HDD and your problems are over!
For maximum working time: Place a HDD always horizontal! (with the text on the HDD readable) and cool it (Temperature BETWEEN 20 and 30 degrees Celsius is perfect) = (68 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit).
And use ALWAYS a dubble backup for minimum saftey!
Good Luck!
P.S.
Beware: These are consumer HDD’s! They are NOT constructed for running 24/7
For 24/7 use; buy SCSI or SAS HDD’s
Re Chris I have same problem a 1tb home hangs using 2 diff sata chipsets connected via a sata->esata cable. What sata chipset did you use that actually worked with it.
I unfortunately bought 3 of the things and they none of them work via esata, I may just return them as they don’t seem to ready for market yet and I am sick of having to spend 10+ hours everytime I buy something coercing it to work. One day they will ship devices that you plug in and they actually work!!!, novel idea I know but a winner IMHO.
If you are considering buying a WD external HD to connect via esata, in a word don’t bother…
@Dave
Questions:
Can you make the eSATA drive bootable?
How many SATA drive’s are connected to one SATA controller on your motherboard?
Is your BIOS set right?
System HDD is booting as the first HDD?
My World Edition seem to have stopped working too, less than half a year after purchase. I think WD makes the least reliable data storage ever, I will never, ever, buy anything from them again
Solution to Vista problems right here! (Along with other usb, firewire device issues you might have). Ok Step one when Vista won’t recognize your new external hard drive (in my case WD Home edition), usb jump drive, or anything else of that nature is to: Pick the option for “Remind me later” when Vista asks you what to do for the “drivers” of your device. Number 2, go to my computer and right click to get to properties and select it. Next go to device manager and select your device that doesn’t have the drivers. Number 3, select update drivers. Number 4, select choose my own drivers from my computer. Number 5, type in C:\Windows\System32 in the blank. This searches your computer for the actual information that windows needs to recognize external devices such as the ones listed above. After Vista finds the devices, then go to the Item again and repeat the same step by selecting update the driver and then selecting “choose from my computer” and typing in C:\Windows\System32. The second time is a charm in this case and Vista should now let you continue as it should. Not sure why this has to be done, but such is life. Enjoy!
I have just bought a MyBook Home Edition, 320GB version. Adding this to my IDE HDD, which was 60GB, I was a happy guy! Finally enough space…and the eSATA said transfer rates of 3GB/s…yeah right
Okay, I got the disc working, now I am running it fine…only some problems:
-The write and read speed is slow…painfully slow. Why do they even bother writing 3GB/s on it, when it cant do a tenth of that speed.
-eSATA…damn, what a pain in the ass. I had to get a converter from SATA to eSATA, but I knew I had to anyway. So…I got home…found the FireWire cable, the usb cable…but no eSATA! This was a little irritating, since both USB and FireWire cables were present. It gave me the impression this thing DEFINATELY wasn’t designed for eSATA. So I bought the cord from the shop…increasing the price by about 30 euros. 1/4th of the original price.
-Delayed Write Failed??? WTF! I am really pissed off about this. Yeah, ofcourse it gets back when I reboot it…but come on, all I am asking is to be able to play music from the damn thing once I switch users in windows.
-And that brings me to the worst bit. Powering off and on…how on earth are you supposed to do it? I have found out that pressing the button once…doesn’t work, but you have to press it for a long time, then press it twice when booting…at least thats how I think it went. In the 21st Century, a simple thing, why can’t it have a proper switch…ON…and OFF.
Othar than these things…I like it.
My MyBook Home Edition 500 gig just failed last night(cant spin up) disk failed without warning just made a very brief crunching sound and now it wont mount (two different putors linux and windows.
Drive has about 10 hours of up time as was used for back up only.
Interesting tho the linux box can see the drive but shows a negative drive space ie -46500000 strange!
im going to remove the drive and mount it in a case in the hope that the usb controller has died and not the drive.
Bought it 10 months ago for AUD 295.00 so not happy.
Take a hint from me google amazon and a few blogs and do not buy one of these books!!
When your buying the drive you think the money you are spending is the important thing but sit looking at 500 gig of dead drive as i am and you will realise the data was the important thing.
WD quality has been slipping for a couple of years since they lowered their warranty to 3 years from 5 years and started talking about an acceptable rate of failure.
Acceptable to them i guess.
I read this website too late.
My Western Digital 1TG My Book sent out a strong burning
smell as soon as it was connected to a window system.
It was connected to a Mac successfully before.
We unplugged My Book immediately but won’t be able to
mount the disk afterwards on anything. The fate of
the data on the disk is unknown at this moment.
Further to the above post removed the drive and hooked it up to a sata port,drive is toast.
Not a great look for a product that was bought to back up important data and that has had a service life of less than 20 hours.
I recently bought a MyBook Studio 500GB to back up my MacBook Pro. I had the same startup problems as mentioned by some above, but I have found a solution.
First the diagnostics: when plugging in the power adaptor, the leds go on, but the drive does not spin up. Instead it makes a clicking sound (about once a second). When I held the drive in my hands, I felt the torque of the disc, like it was trying to spin up but couldn’t.
I found that the problem was the power connector. It did not make perfect contact which means that the drive did not get all the power it needs. There was enough power for the leds to light up and for the drive to keep going once it is on, but the power demand is highest during spin up and it was not getting enough. I took the disk out of the casing and removed the circuit board. Then I measured the output of the power adaptor which was 12.3 V. Plugged into the circuit board, the power was reduced to 12.1 V. When I pulled the plug slightly upwards (in the direction of the on/off button) the power on the circuit board was 12.3 V again. I am not an electronics expert, but I guess that the 0.2 V makes just that difference to get the drive to spin up. Assembled everything back together and indeed the drive did spin up when pulling and holding the plug upwards.
It worked, but I needed a permanent solution, so I took the circuit board + adaptor to an electronics store. They suggested to change the plug on the adaptor. The plug (I am talking about the little cylinder shaped plug at the and of the power cable) that was on there had on the inside (the positive pole) a thin U-shaped spring to make contact. Apparently, this is not a good solution. I replaced it with a new plug which made better contact and now the drive is working like it should. Spins up immediately, also from sleep mode, and I don’t have to wiggle the cable to get it working.
Since this is a power issue, it might be related to the solution suggested by WD, see also a post above
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/western-digital-my-book-pro-edition-ii-sucks/#comment-105792
They suggest to use a direct wall socket for power instead of power strips. This might help to get that little bit of extra power, but it is a weak solution, since you can not always control what comes out of the wall socket.
I realise that my solution is not for everyone (it requires a bit of soldering), but if you can find someone to do it for you, you will have your drive back for only 50 cents (the price of a new plug).
Hope that this post helps a bit.
Hi,
I purchased a My book Home Edition WD Drive 500 Gigs.
After partitioning it, I restarted my computer only to have Windows XP hung on me.
I then had to disconnect my 500 Gig external Drive.
I also had a 320 Gig external WD Drive connected via usb but left that in.
I restart the computer then connect the 500 Gig WD on. It seems to recognize the drive.
When I read the instruction manual on the WD site, it seems to tell users that the drive should be disconnected when the Windows is starting and then plugged in afterwards.
I am wondering if I had problems because it is a 500 Gig drive.
Aside from that, the power switch seems to be at the back. But upon trying to press it nothing happens.
The drive is connected via firewire.
Does anybody have any advise.
The thing is that, I have found negative reviews on just about all brands of 500 Gig external harddrives so its kind of tough to get something reliable.
Please help me..
Hey Kitty Girl,
Your “problemâ€:
I think your computer tries to boot-up from the Firewire drive
Look into the BIOS of your motherboard: By “Firewire Boot-up” or similar: And disable this option.
Dying of external drive’s:
Most of the external HDD’s are getting too hot, because we consumers want little small boxes…
For maximum working time: Place a HDD always horizontal (with the text on the HDD readable) and cool it (Temperature BETWEEN 20 and 30 degrees Celsius is perfect) = (68 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit).
For stopping the drive, use a external swithable powersocket
Greetings,
Mike
Hi Mike,
I will look into my Bios Setup.
I just was wondering why Western Digital seemed to recommend users to connect the drive after Windows starts up.
What is a external swithable powersocket?
For now, I wait for my computer to start up. Then plug the fire wire into the computer. Then plug the power source of the external hard drive into the socket.
I’ve noticed that if the hardrive is already plugged in first and then I plug in the fire wire second, it doesn’t read the drive.
Does placing the harddrives horizontal really make a difference?
I personally would be happy if the hard drives were reliable even if they were huge. I guess this means there aren’t that many harddrives that you can really recommend?
Also is it better that I use my usb wire instead of the firewire for connection. Because when I removed the firewire, the end was hot!
Thanks for your taking the time to reply to my little questions..
Hey Kitty Girl!,
Your questions:
“I just was wondering why Western Digital seemed to recommend users to connect the drive after Windows starts upâ€.
Probably to avoid booting problems.
“What is a external switchable powersocket?â€
An extension cord with a switch. See this example link: First picture.
http://shop.conrad.nl/Verlichting,044_Installatietechniek,044_beveiliging/Installatietechniek/Contactdozen_en_strips/Contactdoos_strips/
“I’ve noticed that if the harddrive is already plugged in first and then I plug in the fire wire second, it doesn’t read the driveâ€.
Try this Windows XP patch:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a2091337-a0ea-4b34-b19f-b6ec04c1f2d2&DisplayLang=en
No result?
Probably you have connected the external Mybook Firewire harddrive directly to your Motherboard?
If the Firewire HDD isn’t showing up in Windows XP, the power supply from your motherboard to the external harddrive is not enough.
Try an external Firewire Hub with an external powersupply, at least 1 amp strong.
See this example: http://www.usbfirewire.com/Parts/rr-fw-hub-6port.html
“Does placing the harddrives horizontal really make a difference?â€
According to different brands harddrive’s designers, it does. Example; all professional server harddrive’s are placed horizontal.
“I personally would be happy if the hard drives were reliable even if they were huge. I guess this means there aren’t that many harddrives that you can really recommend?â€
There are no really bad harddrive’s today. Try to avoid external harddrive’s or use USB-sticks for mobile use. For more storage; preferably install an internal harddrive.
Seagate gives five years warranty… I guess they have more faith in there own products than Western Digital. If they are better?!… I don’t know.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en us/products/external/freeagent_desktop_data_movers/
“Also is it better that I use my usb wire instead of the firewire for connection. Because when I removed the firewire, the end was hot.â€
Firewire is better: The transferrate of data is slightly higher than USB 2.0, the Harddrive stays cooler when using Firewire and the processor-load is approximately 30 percent lower; = less energy use.
It is normal when the end of the firewire cable is slickly hot.
Good luck!
Greetings mike
Working Link:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/freeagent_desktop_data_movers/
@ Kitty Girl
My answer to your questions is reviewd by Tom Raftery…
At least that said the message…
I think reviewing means deletion…
Hey Kitty Girl,
Here I go again… I split the message up to avoid moderating… not only WD HDD’s are sucking…
Your questions…
“What is a external switchable powersocket?â€
An extension cord with a switch; if this breaks, it is easily replaced, an internal HDD Mybook powerswitch is not.
Try this Windows XP patch:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a2091337-a0ea-4b34-b19f-b6ec04c1f2d2&DisplayLang=en
No result?
Probably you have connected the external Mybook Firewire harddrive directly to your Motherboard?
If the Firewire HDD isn’t showing up in Windows XP, the power supply from your motherboard to the external harddrive is not enough.
Try an external Firewire Hub with an external powersupply, at least 1 amp strong or use the USB connection.
See this example: http://www.usbfirewire.com/Parts/rr-fw-hub-6port.html
“Does placing the harddrives horizontal really make a difference?â€
According to different brands harddrive’s designers, it does.
Example; all professional server harddrive’s are placed horizontal.
“I personally would be happy if the hard drives were reliable even if they were huge. I guess this means there aren’t that many harddrives that you can really recommend?â€
There are no really bad harddrive’s today. Try to avoid external harddrive’s or use USB-sticks for mobile use. For more storage; preferably install an internal harddrive.
Seagate gives five years warranty… I guess they have more faith in there own products than Western Digital. If they are better?!… I don’t know.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en us/products/external/freeagent_desktop_data_movers/
“Also is it better that I use my usb wire instead of the firewire for connection. Because when I removed the firewire, the end was hot.â€
It is normal when the end of the firewire cable is slickly hot.
Good luck!
Greetings, Mike
Well not much to say, after my last post (where i discover by myself
that the usb connector on the 2TB Worldbook network is NOT for connecting it
to a usb port on the computer)
Ive return them (ive bought four of them!!!) and bought 4
USB/FIREWIRE ones,
uppon connecting them in the firewire port i had no much lack but
when ive tried the usb port, everything worked (and still works)
just fine.
Hope my luck goes on for long.
May the force be with me….!
WOW WOW WOW!!!
OMG i have sold more than 25 My Books (without purchase warranty) with HUGE profit but never got ANY complaint from any customer :)!
I really don’t know why you guys having so much data loss and drive stuck problems with yours actually i am using my books (My book Es/Prem 500gb) since 2006 but never had such BIG probs and now also 1TB es2.
I am in Asia maybe the hard drives which shipped out side asia having defective products.
By the way after reading all these comments i will search more if i found any better hard drive Seagate or maybe LaCie then i will switch because i think you guys are much hardcore users…
Backup before its too late!
Like so many that have said the same thing above, I wish I’d seen this blog. One thing this does for me though, is shows it’s not my WD product alone - it’s everyone’s. And… it’s not my computer causing this problem.
I wrote WD customer service begging for help and got a computer response. I tried to download the software again and was sent in a loop on their website, saying I had to register to download the software again. I did register. I was told I had registered already. No matter what, I couldn’t download any useful software again.
I warned them if they didn’t help, I’d find a blog somewhere and let people know how unhappy I was. Thanks for having this available to whine.
Hi guys,
After experiencing the same problems as most on here (drive failing - clicking every 1 sec), I finally found a post that worked for me. Thanks Jan.
I realised that, after checking the power cable in the back of the drive, it was actually a little loose. Luckily, I didn’t have to solder it - just push it in really hard. I think I’ll gaffer tape it taught so it doesn’t happen again. It sounds an obvious solution but I really thought the power was plugged in tightly. I guess, even to the IT savvy, you can still make mistakes.
I hope this may help others too!
Cheers,
Jim
First, I completely agree with a few of these posts that remind you all to “BACK UP” you data, not rely on a sole source, and thus risk losing any data! Burn DVD’s periodically if necessary!
Anyway, I just purchased a new 500 GB MyBook Pro from a guy on eBay for $175.00 (a fair price, I think). Understandably, you guys have me a bit worried. I currently have a 60 GB WD Passport for my 60 GB PC hard drive, but it’s getting full now that I store video media. I use Windows XP on my PC, by the way. I’ve had the Passport for over 2 years with no problems.
The reason I’m leaving a post is that I’ve come across some research that may be of interest to everyone here. It seeems that WD was producing most of their products in India and China for a long time, but recently have begun using Thailand more. I’ve seen evidence that most of the products from China and India have very high failure rates, while those produced in Thailand seem to be far better. Can anyone personally verify this based on your devices? This would be very useful research data for all WD buyers. Please leave a post if you have this data to offer. Good luck, and I’ll keep you all posted on how my WD Pro works. I have verified that it was produced in Thailand already, so we’ll see!
@ Shaun Posey
I have two 500GB MyBook Premium, since 5 and 8 months.
Both, made in Thailand, still work very well.
Just took a look at the sticker on the back of the My Book Premium that crapped out on me a couple of months ago. (See my post from December above.) Says “Assembled in Thailand with drive manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand”. So much for that theory.
Maybe you got the only bad one from Thailand Rippy! Just kidding…once more people send in some info, maybe we can see if there’s anything to this. Thanks for you reply, though. As of now, we’re 50/50, which isn’t of much use.
To everyone else, please provide this info if you have it for any WD MyBook, whether it works fine or crashed.
WD still hasn’t replied to my e-mails regarding their manufacturing locations, so I think we can all safely say that their customer service, without a doubt, SUCKS. No surprise there based on what I’ve read and seen.
I too purchased a My Book World Edition, (assembled in Thailand with drive manufactured in Malaysia or Thailand….) for backups and to store music. First backup took about 10 hours, set a backup to run every evening and since then no backup has taken place due to various errors. Anyhoo, drive worked ok for maybe 3 weeks (apart from issues with Vista….), then my daughter was listening to music (via iTunes, lets not go there!!) and the drive just disappeared. Tried all the fixes on the WD site, no help. Can’t even reboot the stupid thing. Tried to call them, but of course their help desk is in Singapore and I am in Australia, so they were shut. Tried to call them again today, and of course, it is a public holiday!!!
Read everyone’s comments, and, not being an IT guru, don’t know what some of you are talking about… All I want is somewhere to keep my backups and music - it shouldn’t be that hard, you purchase something, follow the instructions and it should work!! Once I find out how to retrieve my data, it will be going back to where I bought it!!
Not happy!
I have a 60 GB WD Passport External USB Harddrive made in Thailand and it’s been giving me headaches from the start. At times it transfers data like a charm and other times my WinXP can’t find it or says the disk is not formatted would you like to format now (and lose all your data at the same time). It also freezes up 3 times out of 4 when I plug it to my system. And the system stops responding until I yank the USB cable out. I’ve done every trick I know to try and solve this performance issue, but I don’t think I can expect things to get any better. My Hard Drive Inspector Professional tells me this: Raw Read Error Rate Critical. Indicates the rate of hardware read errors that occured when reading data from a disk surface. Current value 1 –> best 100, threshold 51, worst 1. So my value is 1… Crap. Definitely the last WD product I’ll ever buy.
I have a My Book Premium II 1TB and have trouble connecting it via firewire 400. It connect via USB but not firewire.
I know that my motherboard firewire port works because I have another My Book Premium 500gb that is plugs and plays (no software) via firewire.
I also thought that I have me overloading the firewire by connecting 2 devices, so I disconnected the premium and connected the premium II but it doesnt work.
It shows up in My Computer but I cannot enter it.
my wd roks he is super
Ditto, Ditto, Ditto…… WD My Book Essential 500 crapped out after 4 hours of downloading years of digital photographs. The very reason for purchasing this was to be able to add storage while I went about the process of saving these photos to CD’s, which is a much slower, but safer and permanent backup. After downloading my data, I triple checked everything to make sure it was saved on the My Book hard drive. Satisfied that it was all there and verifying that I could pull it back up when needed, I erased all data from the trash bin to make room on my PC to carry out other functions. The next day I was prepared to get started saving photos to CD’s and the My Book 500 was not recognized by my PC. After every imagineable “fix” that was published, I finally came to the realization that I had lost precious photos that I will never recover. Loved ones that have passed away, the birth of my kids, weddings, baptisms, etc….gone. After reading the posts from above I am extremely disgusted. If anyone is interested in a class action lawsuit against Western Digital, I will be the first one to sign on. It is very surprising to me that a good attorney has not taken advantage of this already. The most insulting thing of all is the fact that their slogan on the box says “Put Your Life On It” Hundreds of people have done just that and have “Lost their most precious moments forever”. Anyone know a good motivated attorney?
@ Sidney
You said: “I went about the process of saving these photos to CD’s, which is a much slower, but safer and permanent backup”.
Dear Sidney,
Saving photos or other data on CD’s is the WORST thing you can EVER do!
The SAVE storing life of a self burned CD is approximately ONLY 1 to 5 years…
If you want to store date safely, use a RAID 1 system or use DVD-RAM DVD’s or even USB sticks.
For professional storage use a tape streamer…
A professional can almost always restore your data if you don’t (accidently) overwrite your data!
Good luck
Mike
i am so sory for you sidenly.. ive had my western 500 gb hardrive for 6 months…. i unpluged it from the computer for the first time…. and now its stuck… computer cant find it and it wont shutdown.. it hacked it self… i had 5 years of stuff on it…. 450 gb information…. “lucky me” i was going to format my western digital to fAT32 system and i had a buddy come over.. which i copied 250 gb of information to… like 1 month ago… so i am going to survive… caus he still havent erased my stuff from his external hardrive.. he also bought like 3 or 4 different western hardrvies.. they all failed western digitals is pure shit ***** hate them so much… i ********************************’ aaaaaaaaaah…. i am so angry,
thought a advice… buy seagate… my friends very satsfied with it.. and 5 years of warranty.. cant be bad huh?
sidnly, you know that you can find some proffsional workshop that can probably extract the information from your broken hard drive… thougt it wont be cheap.. but its not eaither toooo expensive.. probably worth it, wedding pictures etc…
yeah the point of extern hard drive is to have a safe backup, wester digital = not safe
never buy wester product again !
Just lost access to my WD MyBook 500G after 18 months. Win XP can no longer see it and when it does every so often, it prompts me to format the drive as it is not readable. I only used it to keep full backups of my PC, but still I will never be able to recover any data from it.
WD - I “put my life on it” - what are going to do to get it back off?
This seemed like the primary source for information on WD MyBook problems, so I figured I’d add my experience to the mix.
First off, let me say that I love the MyBook drives, I had zero problems with them until yesterday.
Setup:
1TB MyBook Pro II running in RAID1 (500 GB)
2TB MyBook Pro II running in RAID1 (1 TB)
multiple XP Pro machines that access the drive both via firewire 400 and USB 2.0
I had recently completed moving a large quantity (600 GB) of data onto the (recently purchased) 2TB drive when I found one of my computers wouldn’t recognize it. The drive had worked once on the computer in USB mode, but after a reboot it wouldn’t recognize the drive and kept trying (and failing) to install a driver for it. This seems a good time to mention that both drives ALWAYS look for drivers when I connect them, but if you cancel this dialog the drive works just fine…strange, but not problematic.
I went thru the series of uninstalling, reinstalling, rebooting, etc and wasn’t able to get the drive to work on one machine, so I decided to try updating the firmware…after all, sometimes devices have specific problems that don’t arise until a wide variety of users have played with them. BIG MISTAKE. Under no circumstances should anyone perform a firmware upgrade on one of these drives if it has important data on it (of if the drive is old enough that you can’t return it if it gets bricked). I’ve upgraded the firmware on motherboards, routers, firewalls, hell I’ve even pushed firmware updates with TFTP and burned custom CDs to upgrade DVD players…but I’ve never had an experience as awful as with my Western Digital MyBook Pro.
The actual firmware upgrade software sucks, which should have been my first warning. It looks like it was written by a first-year C++ student. When I first ran it, it didn’t even see the WD drive attached to my computer. I clicked in a few spots on the screen trying to coax some action. Disconnecting and reconnecting the drive made a button appear (APPEAR! GREAT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING!) to start the update. Why in the world wouldn’t this application have something to SAY “No MyBook drive found”? Whatever.
I start the firmware upgrade, making sure everything is running on AC power lest I screw up the writing process and brick the drive (little did I know WD would take care of this for me). At some point (the status bar is completely unreliable) the update fails and delivers a message like “OPERATION WAS ABORTED BY DEVICE” Oh shit, was I supposed to buy it dinner first? The drive is BRICKED, when I connect it via USB it detects “Blank Oxford USB Device”…nothing works. The only external indicator of brickness is the inner LED ring is solid whenever there is power. So, that’s around the time I found this thread.
Of course, I have 600 GB of data on the drive, and most of it came off archive CDs I threw away the day I finished…so now I get to go dumpster diving. Why did I want this particular model of drive? Oh yeah, the redundancy that means my data is forever protected. Next step, buy SATA enclosure from Best Buy and 750 GB Maxtor drive. I open the MyBook up and pull out one of the drives, slapped it into the enclosure and voila…files are there. Didn’t have to do any recovery, thank god.
So while I’m copying 600 GB from one of the internal drives to my new external, I figure I should call WD and find out what I can do to restore the firmware. So I spend 20 minutes on hold and then Ishtar comes on the line. I explain the problem to him calmly, he takes my serial number, phone number and name. He says I can restore the firmware by holding down the Reset button and cycling power, holding the reset for 40 seconds (long enough to go to the vending machine?). I perform this on the MyBook drive which still has one hard drive in it…nothing. I ask him “Are you sure this procedure will restore the factory firmware?” He says it will, and I’m somewhat incredulous. Granted, I think this should be the way it works, I just seriously doubt a company that would keep a bad firmware on their website after numerous people have complained about it has the foresight to have a backup firmware on-device.
At this point I wondered what the next step was, Ishtar informed me I could receive a replacement RMA drive. “Will the drive be new?” “It will be a refurbished drive.” “So I’m going to send you my brand new drive, and you’re going to send me someone else’s returned drive that you’ve restored the firmware on?” “Uhhh…” “I think I’ll just return this drive to the store and buy a Seagate, you should probably mention to your manager that the firmware on the website has the potential to destroy the drive…it seems to have happened to a few people.”
Of course no other manufacturer makes a 2tb dual drive external with redundancy, firewire, and USB. So what I’m actually going to do is go buy another MyBook, swap the drives and outer casings (with the serial #, etc), and return the old drive as DOA. So I’m off to the Apple store, where they unfortunately only had the 1TB version…worth a shot. I buy the 1TB drive, swap the drives in from my old MyBook and it works like a charm. The one issue I did encounter was that the drive thought the array was degraded and insisted on rebuilding drive B (which it indicated by rotating both rings of lights clockwise, although this isn’t said anywhere in documentation or the WD support website). It’s going to take like 24 hours, bleh, at least I have my data.
So, good to know, the controller for the 1TB version works just fine with 2 1TB drives. Tomorrow I’ll be returning the “new” MyBook to the Apple store…the reason: it died when I tried to update the firmware, good thing I didn’t have any important data on it!
If you have a firmware failure, I highly suggest this method of recovery…maybe when WD starts getting a ton of returned drives with firmware failures, they’ll release a tool that works!
And, I’m not going to test this, but I am wondering if the firmware failures we’re seeing are a result of the obtuse installation instructions, which are outlined on the download website, but not anywhere in the software. Long story short, you’re support to kill a running process and delete a program before running the firmware (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=26&swid=52). I did not do this…BAD TECHIE…but that’s no excuse for how terrible the update software is.
So, in conclusion, will someone please make a RAID1 enclosure with 2TB capacity, firewire, USB, and a pretty button on the front with more intuitive status lights? It doesn’t even need to have vent holes that spell out something in morse code. If that guy had been on the firmware update team, I’ll bet I wouldn’t have had this problem.
Key points:
- SATA drive and data was accessible when put in a SATA enclosure
- if you’re going to update the firmware, do it when it’s new, do it before you put data on the drive, and when you can swap it at the store if it bricks
- the 1TB controller will work on the 2TB drive-set
- both light rings rotating clockwise means it’s rebuilding the array
- light rings blinking alternating means array is degraded, but you have to open the WD RAID manager to find out which drive is degraded
I hope this helps someone…
Addendum:
I’ve found that daisy chaining the drives using the firewire 800 cable between them (and firewire 400 to the computer) only works if you attach one drive to the computer first, and then run the firewire 800 cable between the two drives. This is kinda clunky, but being able to daisy chain these drives for uber-storage is awesome.
@ MrTruffle
An update to your interesting story:
DON’T use a Western Digital MyBook without an external cooling fan placed against the site of your myBook.
The internal fan is too small to cool your MyBook sufficiently and your drive will die sooner than you expect…
The My Book Premium 500GB that I had has no fan; just air vents. I had an external fan blowing on it, and it still died in less than a year.
Aside from WD telling you to “Put your life on it”, they also say “[My Book] can take it. Bring it on!” HA! What a load o’ crap!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zooITxWHM-U (time index 2:10)
Unlike most people here, my WD MyBook Premium Edition doesn’t work at all. The power adaptor does not work (no LEDs, no power on HDD). I can’t be sure if the drive itself is still working or not.
All this after only a couple of days of use.
I contacted several WD distributors and countless stores but nobody can provide me with the 12V Honor Power Adaptor that is designed specially for the MyBook.
Any help much appreciated.
I have a 500GB WD external, half a year old. Though it’s recognized by “My Computer,” and though “Properties” says it’s about half full (or is it half empty?), each folder is inaccessible, and delivers a “Folder is empty” message when rolled over.
Unplugging and re-plugging seems to correct this for a few days at a time…
I just bought a Essentials Edtion 500 GB from Best Buy yesterday. Everything SEEMS okay, but after reading this… screw this thing.
I have my receipt. Will Best Buy give my a full refund or in store credit you think?
If I tell them it’s damaged, (which I haven’t had a problem with it yet) they will more then likely tell me to contact the manufacuter and then WD will just send me a replacement drive which will no doubt fail me in the near future as well.
So tell them what? I just want my money back. The drive works flawlessly right now. But I don’t want it after reading all these posts. Whats the chances of me getting my $120 back from Best Buy? Anyone know their return/refund policy in a case like this regarding computer hardware?
UPDATE:
Will I am one of the very few success stories. Best Buy is going to allow me to return the 500 GB MyBook I bought yesterday. The lady on the phone said as long as its under a $250 purchase, have the receipt and only bought it yesterday with the drive still in tact and working that I can get a cash refund.
THANK GOODNESS FOR THIS BLOG AND THE INFO. I would have totally copied every single important file I wanted to keep and get off my internal drive on to this piece of crap. And I know how much I would have come to regret it.
So thanks for the warning!
Now i understand why it’s copying files so f.. slow because it’s WD! What External HDD is the best, so??
I just purchased a WD 1TB mybookworld to replace my Buffalo Nas drive. The comuter store had it on sale, then sold it at cheaper price than the sale price. I now know why - it is plain awful. To say it has been a pain in the neck to set up and get going would be asn understatement. Because I changed the IP setting to match what I needed on my network and changed the device name (permitted in the setup) it is now impossible to acess web based setup screen. The shares are recognised on my lan but that is all. I cannot now create any more shares. The reset button only resets the login name & password - nothing else. There is no way at all (except going through a complicated hasck in Linux) of getting back to factory defaults. The thing has been a total expensive disaster and I regret not having paid out a bit more and for a realiable trusted brand like Buffalo who produce NAS drives that actually WORK and veasy to sort out (and reset) when pblems occur. The lack of any way to go back tofactory deafults is a serious omission. I think I will eventually end up getting the 2 500gb drives out and (hopefully) reformatting them to use as regaular drives in a desktop or getting a trusted brand of NAS enclosure and putting them in something that actually works and junking the WD enclosure. If you are loo9kign for a NAS drive look elsewhere. This WD might be cheaper but not worth the hassle.
Hi!
I’ve bought a My Book Pro II (1TB) almost a year ago and had all sorts of problems with it (as many others described before me), but recently it started to work just OK.
I’m using it with a MacBook Pro and attached via Firewire 400 (not the stock cable that came with the unit, but a new, expensive one with golden connectors). I’ve originally formatted the drive with the WD RAID Manager application to use RAID1 (mirroring). My only problem was that the drive hang every day once or twice and all my apps in Mac OS X hung too until I disconnected the firewire cable. Reconnecting the cable brought up the My Book on the desktop again.
It got all fixed after I installed Leopard on the MacBook Pro. I did this from scratch, so not upgrading from Tiger. After the OS installation I did not install the WD RAID Manager bundle, but just plugged in the firewire connector and the My Book was properly mounted. Since then I had no problems at all. Of course I wouldn’t trust valuable data on the unit after all the struggle, but at least I can use it now continuously (without the 1-2 hangs in a day).
I’ve collected my experiences with the unit (including replacing and repositioning the fan) on my blog: http://muzso.hu/wd-my-book-pro-problems
Hi there! I am joining the club guys! My WD My Nook 500GB just stopped working after 3 days of transferring all my music and my work. I cannot believe this.
It doesnt turn on. Now I have to get a guy to recover my data. I will never buy an external HD again. I will never buy anything remotely related to WD again either.
DON’T BUY THIS PRODUCT!
I was going to go buy the 500gb one from Circuit city. But i won’t buy it after reading problems about this product on this blog.
Mine too! My WD My Book 320G kicked it after 9 months of use. The hard drive is arguably the most valuable (at least irreplacable) piece of hardware.
I also think that it is ridiculous that you have to use proprietary software to get the full benefits to use this drive and not be able to store certain content. I bought this drive a couple weeks ago and have had nothing but problems with it. I have files (word docs, PDFs, excel sheets, txt files etc.) on there that I now cannot delete or even edit. I get the error that I don’t have the proper permissions or the file is in use. I am the only one that has access to the files and I am the one that put them there. There are 2 guys that have created a firmware update that allows you to SSH into the drive when installed. I have not been able to do this successfully. The drive will not take the firmware update. Does anyone know why I can’t edit or delete my files? It denies me whether I am local or remote. I can delete them if I do it remotely from the MIO site 1 by 1. But I have 1,000s of files on there. I tried with the same PC I put them on there with. REALLY ANNOYING!!!!!
I’m so frustrated waiting form my 500GB western digital drive to mount, that I decided to google, “Western Digital Sucks.” Here I am. Here WE are. I had a smaller ‘pocket’ drive from them crap out last year. Still I purchased this 500GB drive from costco and it’s a PoS! Maybe I’ll send costco and bestbuy each a letter telling them they need to stop carrying WD products. Yes, this NEEDS to work! It’s backing up all my data! This IS the INFORMATION AGE! Seagate, Maxtor, here I come. And I’m bringing a GiNourmous media library with me.
Oh! Looks like the drive is finally mounted. Awesome!
My book die, then I google and found this site…I read the Mel´s post and did the instructions…it works again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank God!!!! Thanks Mel!!!!!
I have a Western Digital My Book, 160gig, the older model with the green circle on the front so it can be turned off. I don’t remember formatting it into NTFS but my PC shows it is formatted in this so I must have. I am sure I didn’t have a problem doing it or I would remember. When I first got mine, I had lots and lots of photos on it that I was always working on in Photoshop so I left my drive on all the time, just as I do my PC. I always meant to turn it off, but would forget. It stayed on 24/7 many days. After a few months, I began to remember to turn it off, and now I rarely use it though it still has many of my photos on it. When I do plug it in though, it still works just fine. However, I have had more hard drive problems in 3 years using internal Seagate/Maxtor problems than I have ever had with any PC. I have 2 lying here now that were replaced and the 2 drives I have now, one hooked up and one waiting for this one to fail, are refurbished Segate/Maxtors from 2 much newer drives (but they still sent me a refurbished). This 200 gig refurbished drive I am using right this minute wouldn’t boot the other day. I came home to a black screen that said it wouldn’t boot, but I had left it on when I left so I don’t know what happened where it even needed to boot up. After a few days, it began working again. Anyway, I like my Western Digital external drive (at least, so far).
I have several WD My Books. Dont ask me how they are, some work “ok”, some im troubleshooting and some I dont know where to start.
I can say this for sure.
DONT NOT USE THE INCLUDED FIREWIRE CABLE.
Im (im not exaggerating/bluffing) serious, it will damage your computer.
In my case, the faulty firewire cale burnt my motherboard AND graphics card. Ive been using the motherboard & graphics card without issues ( I dont overclock, the room the PC is located in is always cool). Upon using the the included cable, the PC just shutdown and smoke appeared. I opened up the PC box and smelt the burn from the connected fire wire port. Later found out it fried my motherboard which consequently fried my graphics card(not sure how the the graphics card also got damaged)!!!!! I was pissed. I looked at the bright side, when I bought my motherboard/graphics card a year ago it was intentionally bought for a year, so I upgraded to a better more up to date system.
I also bought quality (Belkin) fire wire cables and now it seems ok.
I also contacted them during the time of chaos and they explained (via email) I should send in my firewire cables for a free replacement (so they confess their damn cales are faulty).
ACH! 320 gig mybook failed on me last week. Sadly, two days after my powerbook died. Fate. I had 300 gigs of edited RAW photos. Thousands of quality photos; gone. I feel like my life has been turned upside down. I feel violated. Like I was robbed or something. Apple support has been awesome. Wish I could say the same for Western Digital. When I first called WD the tech asked if I’d like to buy the extended warranty before he even asked why I was calling! The thing is I’ve had the drive less than one year so I was and still am covered by the original warranty. Also, that fucker said “don’t worry sir, our recovery partners will give you a discount.” Yeah, some discount. 10% on a possible $700.00 bill. I’ve been told WD makes a large percentage of the worlds hard drives. I guess when you make that many there is a pretty big margin of “crappiness”.
I’m going to try some of the solutions listed above and ultimately will, after months of saving, send it out for “recovery”.
Everyone who has lost personal, valuable, irriplaceable digital information should tell others thier story and finish it with: backup your backup!
FUCK TO YOU WESTERN DIGITAL MAY ALL YOUR MOTHERS ROT IN HELL!
I smell a class action lawsuit.
Unfortunately, the tip from Nikos D. and Mel didn’t work for me:
1. Unplug from power.
2. Plug usb into computer.
3. Plug back in Power.
4. It works.
5. NOT.
Add me to the list of people unhappy with the Western Digital My Book. I recently bought a LaCie to back up my files…not one single problem. Using it with the fire wire.
I’ll never buy a My Book again. Huge waste of money and time. The product sucks.
… i have to buy a new miniUSB to USB cabel and now is all ok
One My Book Premium II. Dead. After two months. Lost 800 GB of stuff.
I hate WD.
Hi,
I thought I’ll share my experience with WD, after all I had some minor issues. My configuration is:
-dell inspiron 8200 with XP, USB1.0 (12Mbits/s) and firewire (400Mbits/s), no USB 2.0
-my book pro edition 500Gb (USB 2.0, firewire 400 and 800)
-my book studio 500Gb (USB 2.0, firewire 400 and 800, eSata (3Gb/s)
The laptop that I used is unfortunately equipped with USB 1 which is dreafully slow but as I’ve got a firewire connection, I bought a 500Gb my book pro with has the firewire. I could not get it to work at first with either connection. The windows Disk Management software could see it but would not allow me to format it. I installed the various update and software from the WD website without success. I had to use the Swiss Knife freeware to create a partition then I was allowed to format it in FAT32. Finally it worked after days of despair. 6 months later it’s still working.
About 6 months after the 1st one, I got a my book pro studio 500Gb, same story here, it wouldn’t work at all. Again I had to use the swiss knife software to be able to create a partition and then format it in NTFS.
The WD button manager (blue WD icon in the task bar) doesn’t work with the drive in NTFS format but seems ok with the FAT32 one. I’ve one HD plugged to the PC and the next one plug directly to the drive all in firewire. The transfer is a bit slow but at least it works well.
The FAT32 formatter from WD is another piece of s***. It’s supposed to allow a user working with windows to format such drive to FAT32 in order to be able to use it in 2000, XP or vista environment. Well it could see the drive but an error message pop up when I tried to use it.
My advices, if you happen to buy the dual interface HD, are as follow:
-buy a 6 pin to 4 pin firewire cable or 9 pin to 4 pin firewire cable to connect your HD if you don’t use the USB; the firewire cables which came with the 2 HDs were the 9pin to 9 pin and 6 pin to 6 pin. The 9 pin is for the firewire 800, the 6 pin is for the 400. The 4 pin is the tiny firewire connection found on some laptops.
-don’t bother to call the tech support, they only pissed me of more than anything else and never sort out my problems when I contacted them,
-don’t install the updates and various softwares provided on the WD website, it doesn’t help either,
-use swiss knife to create a partition,
-then format it in NTFS.
And did I forget to mention that patience is a virtue!!!
Good luck.
JB
My Book ES 500GB Absolute piece of Garbage failed after one year…..primarily used a data backup.
Does a 16 click thing. Windows wont boot if the drive is plugged in. Cannot get to the login screen with the drive plugged in.
I am watching the comments and am up for a Class Action. This is a shitty prodcut.
OK… I am most definitely adding my 2 cents.
I have a WD-Mybook Essential Edition 500 GB (which I think is an IDE), and it has been nothing but bullshit since I bought it. The hard drive inside works fine, it’s the fact that it makes Vista (original, and also the service pack 1) take an extra 40-50 seconds to boot up. It’s slow as dirt, and it also constantly spins down and takes a bunch of time to come back to life when you access it. Sometimes when it spins down, it doesn’t come back, and is not recognized (like it has disconnected from the rest of the computer).
DO NOT use this as a standard external HD. You can only truly effectively use this drive as a backup drive. I wouldn’t even trust it as that. I am going to be doing the same thing that many have done, which is shitcan the enclosure, and reconnect the drive to a different enclosure. Antec has a really good SATA enclosure that’s big, but FAST.
As far as WD drives = teh suck…. I would like to state for the record that WD Raptor Drives are (and have been) fantastic drives, and I highly recommend that these be used for anyone needing some high end speed. I’m ordering another WD Raptor later this month… they are so fast, it’s ridiculous, and better and safer than raid0 for security. Wait until you break a stripe, and you’ll know what I mean.
WD tech support is, as many other of these businesses, located somewhere in Calcutta, New Dehli, or somewhere where everyone has an indian accent (not that there’s anything wrong with the people, it’s the communication skills that sometimes suck), although I didn’t have a bad Customer Service experience with them.
Yeah, I wonder how many people would come forward to initiate a class action suit. I went to Youtube to see what’s up… it looks like a lot of videos of people showing the lights flash, and opening the boxes. I want to put my 12ga barrel up to this Hard Drive, and bring the thunder.
Why the hell does it hang or not allow an OS to properly boot? With no offered firmware or fixes? GARBAGE! I luckily got out of it without losing data… although it’s given me some pretty bad scares… should I video the disassembly? Would that help anyone?
Hey Guys,
If you want rid of your WD My Book World Edition external drives ‘cos they’re shot, send em to me. I’m experimenting with some ‘upgrades’ to the firmware and trying to do it on the cheap so knackered units are preferable. If they are out of warranty for any reason I cannot give you anything but postage, but will offer something otherwise, depending on the age and condition of the unit.
Regs
Ian
I’ve had my My Book 250GB Premium for a year now. Other than being slow to spin up it’s never had any issues. Two nights ago on of my office IT folks unplugged the USB cable from my laptop. The next morning the HD is no longer recognized as “My Book”, but as “WD2500JS External USB Device”.
When I try to open the drive it now states that the drive is not formatted, and asks whether I want to format it now? God No!
I downloaded the WD Diagnostic software & ran both a QUICK TEST and an EXTENDED TEST. In both cases the ‘SMART’ status got a FAIL, but the ‘test result’ got a PASS.
Help-Is there an hope for this poor sinner to get his data back (For less than $700, which is what one of WD’s preferred data recovery ‘PARTNERS’ quoted me.) I’d love some suggestions that a relatively low-tech guy could consider.
Things I’ve thought of but haven’t tried yet:
-GetDataBack; Do it yourself data recovery software.
-Cracking open the case & placing the HD into a new enclosure. (would that work if it’s a HD issue.
-Finding a cheaper data recovery specialist. (I’d be willing to pay ~$300-$400 to get my family photo’s back.)
Your thoughts & comments are all appreciated…
Hi Mike,
I saved a friends My Book drive and data with a program called testDisk. We had to remove the drive from the westerndigital enclosure and attach it to a computer. email me if You want some help.
mosesiam(at)charter.net Brian
ohhh,
I was thinking to buy a 320 Gb My External Book Essential Edition from WD, but i was reading the comments, no way.. I will choose other HD, thanks to all for the advice..
Let me add to this tale of woe.
I too bought WD MY BOOK 500gb Home Edition about three weeks ago.
Believing the hype about this product I have stored about 100gb of personal data on this machine and trusted it to work.
Last night while backing up quite a small file I had an error message saying it was unable to backup this file. It crashed and now registers as having 0 data, that is no data - have I lost 100gb of data???
when windows tries to access the drive it tells me it is empty. I have tried it on 2 computers so far and it is the same.
I curse this company Western Digital as they obviously don’t know what they are doing.
HOW DO I GAIN ACCESS TO MY DATA
I can’t ever trust this device nor the company that made it ever again.
Sidney
I don’t have much money these days and live in Malaysia but I would join you in a law suit against these bastards
Shaun Posey
My My Book Home Edition 500 GB is made in Thailand/Malaysia that is what it says on the box - and its still CRAP
I bought a Western Digital Book with 320 gigs. Now my computer doesn’t recognize it and says that there is a i/0 error. Can anyone help me or more importantly, is there a way to get my stuff off the hard drive and how?
Thanks
Get ready to get out your wallet; if you can’t get their tech support to fix it over the phone, they’ll offer their data recovery service for mucho $$$. It’s a total fucking scam. Buy their product, trust it, get the shaft, and then pay them more to get the data back. Every time I see one of these posts, I shudder. WD is raping innocent people regularly with My Books.
The only thing that I would try would be to unplug everything, reboot, and then follow the setup instructions again. These things have a weird way of just “not being recognized” out of nowhere.
Mine is taking more and more time to spin up lately… luckily, I have Acronis True Image, and have a secondary 1GB sata external with the Antec enclosure. Save your money next time, and buy a nice aluminum enclosure, and a big drive. ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA SOMEWHERE ELSE. I have to say that trusting any singular data source is stupid these days (trying not to add too much insult to injury).
@ Steve
You said:
“A “nice” enclosure for a harddisk is fine…”
If the enclosure has an internal minimal 8 CM FAN!!!
Without forced FAN cooling your harddisk is getting too HOT!!! Your harddisk will get strange malfunctions and than it will die!
A EXCELENT and very cheap solution for a very BAD (Western Digital) external harddisk casings is this:
http://www.coolermaster.com/products/product.php?act=detail&id=2542
12 CM silent fan and a LOT of room for more than one harddisk!!!
You are absolutely right! ALWAYS make a SECOND Back-Up!
It is obvious that, if you need backup, you need at least 2-3 diffenrent backup media to be sure that, when one of them dies, other will still be alive… Insane…
Now, this MyBook is obviously shi**y solution. What about external cases and some Seagate/Maxtor HD inside?
@Tom
Here’s what I use right now. And it works really well.
http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=77150
I’m all about cooling, no doubt. I have a Coolermaster 830 Stacker Chassis (I run two Nvidia 9600 overclocked in SLI), which is off the charts for cooling fans, and is absolutely beautiful.
I still stand by the fact that the MyBooks may suck ass, but their Raptor Drives are awesome.
@ Steve
The problem with the 1 GB (and above) Western Digital external harddisk; they are getting much too hot because the internal fan is to small and the housing sucks!
At ONLY room temperature (68 Fahrenheit) the external 1 GB harddisk got 131 Fahrenheit!!!
@ Ayax
I you Google other brands of harddisks, you will see the same problems with most of the external harddisks wich are NOT forced/special cooled…
Ask Tom Rafteryit… He says he has (still?) got a good working Buffalo station… with… Western Digital harddisks inside
Sorry Tom, don’t shoot me
The example from Steve:
The Antec MX-1 Actively Cooled Hard Drive Enclosure is also a very nice and excellent solution for the bad Western Digital housing!
Oeps!
Slip off the pen:
Tom Rafteryit = Tom Raftery
I spent the entire weekend dumping video and photos to my new WD My Book 750. Just woke up this morning to find the light off and the drive not powering up. When unplugging and then plugging the drive back in I hear a whining sound. I am furious. How can this many people be having problems with this line of dives? This is rediculous!
I WILL NEVER BUY WESTERN DIGITAL AGAIN.
I bought 4 of these to use for video production and they make me want to kill myself. I am trying to take advantage of the eSata connection, but if I stop working just long enough to get a snack, when I come back the drive has entered a “green power saving” mode and to get it to wake up, my computer completely freezes for 10 seconds, then my monitor connection and internet connection disconnects turning my screen black and knocking my network offline. It’s awesome. I’ve even written them a letter complaining and they didn’t even bother responding. Don’t even get me started on having to hold the power button in for 10 seconds to power these pieces of crap down.
I’d like to have something cleared up. Specifically, has anyone out there who’s MyBook has suffered “clicks-of-death” been successful in recovering data by opening the enclosure and connecting the drive internally; or will this method only work with drives that are not clicking?
Also, if anyone has taken in a clicking MyBook for professional data recovery, how successful were they in getting their data back?
I’ve got a clicking MyBook—with a few 100 gigs of stuff trapped on it—just sitting on the self. It’s time I decided what to do with it.
This will bring your hard drive back to life without opening the hard drive or paying a ridiculous amount of money to the recovery websites.
Sorry forgot the URL
http://do0g.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-recover-from-failed-mybook.html
I FIX IT
I bought a new 320 gig my book died on me a few months later with all my memmories and music, went to best buy bought a new one took it apart and swapt the 2 circuit boards that are on the harddrive with the new PRESTO SHE TURNS BACK ON>>> hope this helps
Same here received My Book 1TB days ago, still cant get anything to talk to the device. The support documentation is woefully inadequate, and the extend of WD technical knowledge stops at a hard reset for the device. DO NOT TOUCH THIS UNIT.
Mel, it works, thank you!
I have WD’s My Book 500GB external hard drive and it broke down after 1 year… Ok it still has warranty but what the f*** this helps me when I can’t get my documents back.
WD —> never again!
OK, I had to put in my two cents.
I bought my First MyBook 500GB Over two years ago. It worked fine up until yesterday. I had already bought a second MyBook 500GB just last year and moved all the “important” stuff on to it, leaving the older 500GB to handle mostly throwaway or replaceable files (TV shows, etc.).
I thought of getting some thing else to replace my failing 500 (it still runs but locks up after about 10GB of file transfering).
I ended up with a 1TB MyBook from Costco like the other two. And that is my biggest source of comfort. Costco has been selling these drive for at least 2 years. One thing about Costco, they have and excellent return policy and they never keep things around that have too high of a return rate. If these MyBook drives were dying as frequently as this blog comment section implies Costco would have dropped them years ago.
Either Costco’s Board owns lots of WD stock or they are simply not as bad as this list makes them seem. I like my MYBooks and think WD drives are no worse than any other consumer grade hard drives.
Cheers.
My Western Digital MyBook Pro 500GB has just packed in. Won’t mount, won’t portition, won’t reformat. It’s recognised in the Disk Utility on my Mac but it won’t let me do anything with it. I’ve requested an ‘Advance replacement’ through the Western Digital Support site.
Luckily, the drive was relatively empty with no important data that wasn’t already backed up elsewhere…had it of contained important data, I would have been in tears.
My My Book 500GB Essential edition packed up after about 6 months. I bought it to free space up on my pc and all the family photos were stored etc. Green light remained on, no noise or smoke but just wasn’t recognised by my PC anymore. Tried it on a different PC and changed the USB cable but no good. Tried the various reboot advice from here but didn’t work for me. Support was poor - had the same problem with emails as noted above and eventually after half an hour on the phone they said they would send me a new one. Great. Wanted to try and recover the data on it and didn’t want to pay £200 which seemed to be the minimum charge so following the advice here I took it apart and connected the HD to my PC. I am not a techie but it wasn’t too tricky. Have struggled a bit with the “jumpers” but think I have it now so that my main HD is the master and the WD HD is the slave. However, on start up I get a Pri Slave HDD Error in the BIOS and the PC won’t recognise it. It does autodetect Master and then Slave IDE but then I get the HDD error. Is there anything more I can do?
God Damn It! I just spent $1200.00 on purchasing 2 My Book Premium Edition II (2TB) today and while transferring files from both my PC and Portable so that I can finaly have some breathing space to work with, I stumble upon this forum…shit shit shit! I better not lose all my info or I’ll kill someone I swear…so far so good…shit shit shit!
I bought a WD 1 terrabyte external USB drive 3 months ago for $218.00 from dell.
I have had no problems and it woks rind. I might buy another. WD is by far the best drive I have ever used - maxtor has failed me so many times - just lost a 120 gig maxtor and I shudder to think of all the work to go when my other three maxtor drives go bad.
I do have one problem with the WD maybook. It looks for a driver everytime I boot up or plug it in. That wastes alot of time for me. I dont recall ever getting one from WD when I bought the drive.
I’ve read to not use that anywhere software so I just want the driver or to stop windows from asking for it.
Thanks
MajorHart
Hi,
I bought a 320 GB Mybook external HD and the same thing happenned. It starts to make a clicking noise and nothing. Never buying a WD product again. And to the doofus that made the comment about Tom just getting a bad one, how do you explain 1000’s of people? A little lax on the QA policies now are we? Now go back to your QA people and ask them to check the external drives before “certifying” them for sale because y’all are sure losing business fast!!
MC
One thing I will give a thumbs up to WD for is the advance replacement programme they have. You can simply put in an order for an RMA request and they send you out the new one before you have to send back the old one. Does require they take a credit card but as long as you send back within 30 days, they won’t charge you.
I agree with oni, WD have a great advance replacement program - I’ve sent one or two back with no problems at all.
First I want to say that I share the pain with you all. I, too, own a MyBook Essential 500Gb drive. In the past, I have never had problems with WD products. I currently have a internal SATA WD Caviar 250Gb that I run windows on. Had it over a year with no problems. I used to have a MyBook Essential 250Gb (first edition with round green light) and never had a problem with it.
I decided to upgrade to more space and got the 500Gb 2nd Edition MyBook (blue led on front). Had it for about a year before I started experiencing problems with it. It began to get bad sectors on it. When trying to access a file within that bad sector, my computer displayed an error message and then shut the drive off. I would bave to reboot the drive and my computer to gain access to the drive again. I contacted WD Support and the only assistance they offered was to ship me a new drive. While waiting for the replacement drive, I managed to save most of my pictures, music, and documents to my internal drive. I did loose about 100 movies and about 400 mp3s.
I recieved my replaccement drive and plugged it in, but had to call WD Support again to figure out how to get my computer to recognize it since it was not formatted (the first one was ready to go out of the box). After formatting the new drive, it seemed to work properly. So I continued to move my files back over to the new drive. For the first couple of days it worked great. I was running Norton Speed Disk to defragment my drives, and suddenly my external drive disappeared. I looked in My Computer and it was not there. Unplugged it and plugged it in again, but to no avail. I opened up Device Manager and it showed my internal drive (WD 2500xxx) but only showed “WD” as the external drive (should have read WD 5000xxx). Tried safely removing hardware, removing usb mass storage device, and even edited registry entries. Nothing. My computer just would not see it. Now, Device Manager is not even recoginzing.
So I did some research, read some blogs and came across this website:
http://rebootdaily.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-open-western-digital-my-book.html
Since WD only offers a replacement drive, and not any information on how to recover the drive, I went ahead and opened the case up and removed the drive. I followed the directions and plugged it internally, but my computer still wouldn’t recoginze it. I went through my BIOS, but it wasn’t detected. It is a little different than my other internal drive. It does not have the Legacy Power connector like the 250gb. Only has 2 SATA connections (SATA Power and SATA Data) The drive DID have power, I felt it spinning and it sounded like it was on. But no luck in getting it to work.
Stupidly, when I was moving all files back to the new drive, I did not back up everything to CD or DVD.
So, I took it back out, and reconnected the usb connector. The drive powers on, the lights come on, and it acts like it’s working. But my computer still won’t recognize it. It doesn’t make the sound when you plug a usb device in or unplug it.
I’m just about out of options. I have already tried plugging it in to abother computer, and when I did, it started installing the usb drivers, but then made the computer restart in the middle of installation! Very weird. So my only other option is to take it to the local computer store and do a drive recovery. They are pretty inexpensive compared to other companies. I think it was about $39 for the first DVD and $20 for every other DVD after that. Pretty reasonable, but still ridiculus because WD sent me a shotty drive.
I will never buy another WD Product. I will very soon be purchasing a new internal drive to replace the WD 2500. As far as the MyBook series, I will never suggest to anyone to get one. You are better off with another brand. BACK UP YOUR INFO!!!! That’s an even better idea.
If anyone has any other ideas on how to get this drive accessable, please share the knowledge. I have never had a problem with a computer that I couldn’t fix, until this one. And I have been pulling my hair out trying to find a solution. Good luck to everyone that is experiencing this problem!
McGyvr
similar problems mounting, tried everything then read Nikos D
5/3/2007 at 8:19 am comment, plugged power in AFTER USB, it mounted, my gradute work is saved, now off to buy a proper G-tech drive.
Being an engineer, I really side with the WD-bashers. I find most of the “you should do this instead” suggestions completely out of place. Attach an external fan?! Limit/modify usage patterns (copy data little by little)?! Use USB over FireWire as it “uses less CPU and causes less heat to be generated”?! What the fuck?!
When you design such a product, it’s supposed to by used by non-technical average joes. It means someone is going to plug it in, power/usb/firewire in random order, and leave it so. A design for such a product which depends on users doing things in a particular way is completely out of whack with reality and good engineering sense.
Never mind that a lot of comments here are outright wrong, especially ones about CPU usage. What has that got to do with anything - I doubt the sata-to-firewire/usb controller really generates significantly different heat loads based on what interface you use. As for your PCs CPU, who cares either? Any CPU load you get due to sustained 50MB/s transfers is tiny anyway, most of the CPU usage is due to accessing the filesystem and whatnot.
There’s really no big deal in designing an external drive that will work no matter what, won’t overheat in normal conditions (45C ambient), and won’t require users to scour forums for hints/solutions. I have had a couple tiny 2.5″ Seagate 80GB USB drives in ventless plastic enclosures, powered via a double USB cord (a hack but works just fine). They never had a single problem, and could sustain 45Mb/s read/write rates, on both XP and Linux machines. So obviously it can be done, and inexpensively too.
I don’t even think that WD engineering is at fault here, it’s usually the management which pushes a crappy product out to the marketplace, and they also decide to screw customers as a matter of policy. Unless WD is full of engineers that are liars when talking to the management; I find it hard to believe.
I have dealt with much bigger, more complicated products, that in the end require a “plug it in, flip the switch, pop the CD and run it” mentality and they do it just fine.
@ Kuba
And your point is…?!
If you are not a part of the (best/simpelest) solution… You are part of the problem…
Get real! You are an engineer…
Not the best quality is bought, but most always the cheapest!
Why, tell me why, are ALL PROFFESSIONAL 3.5″ Harddisks/Serverdisks foreced air-cooled?
If you bought a WD external 3.5″ HDD housing, trash it!, and buy for example an Antec MX-1 housing if you need your date stored safely!
And yes! (WD) external 3.5″ HDD’s are an bad choice.
P.S. Date = Data
@ Kuba
Are you realy comparing heat production from 2.5″ Disks, with 3.5″ disks ???!!!
I too purchased a WD hard drive, not only will it not work I can’t even registered, when I call in I have been disconnected, when I do get in all I get is a foreign agent that barely speaks coherent English. I am returning the drive.
I bought MyBook 500GB for 3 months - used it once 3 months ago - everything seems fine. Used it the second time - it hang while trying to delete some folders. After a 20 minutes wait I had to shut down my notebook and unplug MyBook.
It won’t be recognized since. I spent 3 hours trying to get it to recognized. It eventually showed as an uninitialized drive. But no matter what I did I could not get it to initialize and formatted.
In short - forget about MyBook. I would suggest to forget about Western Digital altogether.
My Western Digital Premium 1TB triple option died last night. Kind of pissed off that the warranty was only a year. Makes clicking sounds on top of the hair dryer sound it usually makes. Not going to buy WD external products again or rather I’ll pay closer attention to the warranty before I buy. But I got screwed - that’s for sure!
I’ve had my 1TB MyBook for about three weeks, just enough time to back 400GB of photos and files from my workplace before I moved to another job. It suddenly stopped working. Years of photos of friends, family, important events, the last photos of my grandfather before he passed away…all gone for no good reason at all.
Don’t ever buy a Western Digital Hard Drive again.
You have to speak with Consumer relations or someone with authority at Western digital and they will send you a new drive free of charge. I called to complain or comment about how this drive really sucked and they sent me a new one for free.
Good luck.
David,
Did they offer to pay to recover your data, too? Of course not. I wouldn’t accept another piece of crap from this company. I bought mine at Costco so took it back for a full refund and reported the issue to them as well.
Tina
WD HAS TO BE THE MOST IRRESPONSIBLE COMPANY EVER TO PUT OUT A PRODUCT. I’M KEEPING THIS SHORT. I BOUGHT AN EXTERNAL DRIVE FROM WD AND STORED ALL MY PICTURES AND VIDEOS ON THERE THEN FOUR MONTHS DOWN THE LINE IT FAILS AND I END UP LOSING ALL MY PICS AND VIDS. NOT EVEN A RECOVERING AGENCY WAS ABLE TO RETAIN MY DATA. I CALLED WD AND THEY REPLACED IT WITH A NEWER VERSION AFTER I THREATEN THEM TO SPREAD THE WORD. THEY SEND ME ANOTHER ONE AND COME TO FIND OUT, IT FAILS TO RUN AFTER 2 WEEKS!!! THEY HAS GARBAGE PRODUCTS. I HAVE HAD A SEAGATE EXTERNAL FOR ALMOST 5 YEARS NOW AND IT’S STILL GOING AND GOING AND GOING. MY ADVISE…..DON’T BUY A WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVE UNLESS YOU DON’T MIND LOSING YOUR DATA.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
Dear Sir,
I found your site following your comments concerning Western Digital external hard drives. I wonder if you could provide me with some advice or point me where to get answers from.
My system: SONY VAIO-L, Vista Home Premium, 2 Gb main memory
External Drive: Western Digital 320Gb MyBook
The problem: although the drive connects and working fine when I copy files or whole directories onto it using Windows Explorer, when I would like to back up the whole system, the computer simply cannot find the target drive.
Now, I know the problem, that is whilst the backup programme collects the information from the computer as to what files to back up, etc…, a considerable time, say 2-4 minutes, is passing, during which the MyBook is going to SLEEP, and it doesn’t sense that there is data to be downloaded and it must WAKE UP. Therefore I simply cannot use the drive for large scale backups.
There must be a way to make the drive not to go to SLEEP (I can’t wake it up by pushing the power button either). Perhaps the problem lies with a Vista setting that I don’t know of.
Would you have a solution? If so, please let me know.
Sincerely,
David Sade
My saga is similar to most - Already mentioned above.
After a couple of weeks the MYBOOK swallowed 500 gig of precious material. I sent it back to the shop I bought it. They, without telling me, reformatted the hard drive and kept the unit for over 4 months. On complaint the local WD people took the unit from the retailer and tried to salvage my material - they succeeded but all the 500 gig of material was corrupted.
I am about to write and tell them what they can do with their products
@ Lenin (And all other souls).
You forgot something!!!
1 BACK-UP = NO BACK-UP!!! Use ALWAYS a secondary Back-Up!!!!!!!!!!
@ David Sade
Did you try to DISABLE the WRITE-CACHE of your Western Digital USB drive?
See example:
http://lonesysadmin.net/2007/01/29/windows-vista-performance-tip-enable-write-caching/
Use option: Optimize for quick removal
@ David
If that doesn’t work, try to ENABLE the Cache and see what happens.
Maybe you can chance a setting in Vista energy control, see this Link: Disable harddisk sleep or similar.
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=power_mgt.pr_power_mgt_manual_act_winVista
I have two different cases with the WD Studio Edition line. I bought one 1TB WD SE drive 6 months ago and it works like a charm, no problems! In fact, I was so happy with it that three weeks ago, I bought a 2TB drive of the same model. BIG MISTAKE! The drive keeps disconnecting by itself while I’m working - I use this drive for editing HD video material and thus opted for the 800 Firewire port etc. but what is it worth? NOTHING! I tried an eSATA port on my friend’s Hackintosh and it seems to work better with this cable, though it means I have to spend an additional amount of money to buy an eSATA connectivity card for my Macbook Pro..! This sucks WD!
It seems that with WD products, you’re taking a gamle, 50% of the drives seem to work, but the other 50% suck ass from a straw!
Any users having similar problems with your WD Studio Edition II, let me know! I’m desperate, this material is like a baby to me!
@ Nocturne
It getting worse… If you use the WD casing, your Harddisks are getting too hot!
Using eSATA, you can see that the temperature will exceed WD own harddisk specifications!
I have had my MyBook Essential II since January 2007 and it has always worked well for me. Enough so that I made the mistake of entrusting my files to it. I run Vista, and one day it decided to not want to show up in any list (My Computer, Device Manager, Disk Management, ect). I emailed WD and they told me to download the driver off the download page…so I did. Guess what? DIDN’T WORK. So I sent another email to them telling them what the last guy told me to do, and that it didn’t work. You wouldn’t believe the response I got. “Have you tried going to the downloads section of our website and downloading the device driver?” Me: NO! What makes you think based on the last email I sent you, that I have ever done that before! >.< Anyways, I decided that I need the CD that came with it and get the driver I need off of there. Except I have had it for so long that the CD is long since been lost…
If ANYBODY has a copy of the CD for the MyBook Essential Edition II (mine is a 250GB), and could possibly rip the CD or just the driver…or anything that could possibly help, I would greatly appreciate it (and might even refrain from bashing some skulls in at WD).
I guess I’ve been lucky. I have had a lot of WD caviar and my current mybook 1 terrabyte and they all work great. I’m had the external a year now and got it from Dell for $218.00. I have another that is the system disk and it’s a sata and I have another that is an Eide.
I have had lots of trouble only with maxtor - which is now seagate.
[email protected]
I have a 2TB My Book Premium Edition II since March 2008.
I use it as a Firewire 800 HD on my Macbook Pro. It’s not mirrored, I formatted the disk so that it makes a 2TB full disk instead of 2x 1TB.
I went on holidays for a couple weeks. I got home and… the disk doesn’t start. I guess the disk is in good shape (it always worked perfectly) but the electricity doesn’t go through anymore or something. Anyone heard something similar and a possible solution?
I would not mind taking the 2 disks out and put them in a brand new HDbox, if only there’s one that supports those disks the way they have been formatted and used (i.e. not having to erase my 2TB worth of daily work…)
thanks!
@ Insky
Is the USB connection still working? (You don’t mention it).
Your 2 HDD’s are formatted (in raid 0) by the own WD controller…
Maybe, just maybe… an extact WD housing wil reconice your HDD’s…
P.S.
For important data: Never, never use RAID 0
1 Back-Up is no Back-Up!
Good lucK!
Finally took apart my MyBook 500GB essential. Besides the quirky behavior and horrible power management and the cpu not being able to actually recognize the drive, it was working fine… It was a snap to take it apart, and inside was an IDE 500 GB WD Caviar SE Drive, which I quickly transferred into a Acomdata all aluminum enclosure that I’ve had for a long, long time with no failures. Feel free to reply to this post if you want any more info on the process. It was easy, and is nothing to be afraid of. Get the drive out of that WD shite enclosure before failure!!!!
Cheers!
I have a set of a friends WD500. Few years old. Previously, discovered they sort of cloned their drive id chips, so certain pairs would not work together. Oh well, just a shuffle.
But, is this normal: the drive lights stay on even with the power turned off! In fact, the drive gets down right WARM.
Only thing that stops it is to unplug the FireWire cable.
That is a lot of power to be taking from the FireWire, to keep the drive warm!
>Chris
>18/12/2007 at 11:24 pm
>I have bought a my book2 studio edition 1tb a few days ago. I >don’t read about any problems with the studio edition here, so i >hope everything will be ok.
I have been using WD disks for >several years and always been happy. Before that i had Maxtor and >those crapped out on me.
Hi all. This was me one year ago. Don’t worry my drive is still alive! However, it starts to become noisy. It’s the same noise as good old ball bearing disks used to make once they got older. Also, sometimes the disk turns itself off and then i have to unplug the power to get it working again. Very strange! I have a toshiba 1tb disk next to it which backups every single bit. So, the coming months i will see what happens with this baby. Lucky me i have five years of warranty.
@ Chris
All the external MyBook WD housings are getting too hot so your Hard drive will eventually malfunction
The airflow in the housings sucks!
If it’s broken, you will get are “new” refurbished one!
If you have a eSATA MyBook, you can use a very good external Antec housing for your WD harddisk, with excellent cooling properties. eSATA has the same LARGE transfer rate as usual SATA!
http://www.antec.com/usa/productDetails.php?lan=us&id=77150
OK everyone, I’ll spell it out. No matter what, the circuit boards attached to the WD hard drives are SHIT! There is NOTHING that can salvage them. The boards are drive specific, so swapping them out is of no use. If you are an unfortunate soul who has fallen victim to this (like me). There is only one thing to do: Send your drive off to a professional lab to be restored, spend the money (lots of it), buy another hard drive, then another and then another. When/if you get your stuff back, backup your material, then back it up again on another drive, then back it up again on yet another drive. Then, MAYBE your files will be okay. If this experience has taught me anything, it is that NOTHING IS CERTAIN. Back you shit up again and again and again and again and again. Then back it up some more.
Dear Western Digital,
Just today, my second external 500 GB hard drive failed. I have tried everything to recover my files, since I, under the assumption that this external drive would be reliable enough to use for backing up and archiving data, used this as a “closet.” That drive contained so much of my stuff that I had created over the past few years! Reformatting is out of the question. You know what I wish on you scumbags at Western Digital? I wish that you were Hasidic Jews living in Poland circa 1942, that is how much anger and hatred I harbor towards you, Western Digital. Not that I am a Nazi or Jew-hater, just the sheer amount of cruelty as the only example in pop culture that I could think of.
- signed, a man with an itchy trigger finger who hates you more than he hates Osama bin Laden, President Bush, Obama, Hillary, McCain, the treacherous pigs who caused the economic crisis, … I could go on for hours here with all the hate I have for you, Western Digital!!!!!!!!!!
I’ve been buying Western Digital for 3 years now and have had no problems. Ever. I’ve had LaCie fail on me and come non-functioning from the box. So far so good with WD. I’ve JUST received another 1tb my book studio edition to back up the last one I filled up and which I use for all my music and films. If it’s that important it needs backing up, right? I’ve had friend kick off when their PCs have crashed and lost 3 years of their kids growing up or 2yrs of itunes. Nothing is guaranteed. Except death and taxes.
I had a problem with a 500 GB MyBook soon after buying it. Problem was that files would not transfer back and forth. The files showed within file manager but always got a window error whenever trying to copy or write to the MyBook. Traced problem to the switching adapter. Model number ADS-24P-12-2 1224G. Luckily the 500GB MyBook works with my 250GB MyBook’s power adapter. The 250GB has been going on strong for 2+ years.
Yeah I had a western digital external hd that killed itself after a year. Vowed never to buy that crap again.
Two years later I buy some premade computer and after a year the hd crashes. I take it out, and of course it’s a fucking western digital. What a piece of shit. Never had a problem with any other drive, just them.
I really don’t know where you guys get it from? I’ve have a Western Digital (Internal IDE 120GB) for about 6 years now and never once had any problem with it. I also have a Wedtern Digital 1TB My Book Pro for the last year and a bit and again I’ve never had a single issue with it. I use them both practically every day and I’ve worked them to the limit. In the market now for another 1TB external and would only choose Western Digital. You guys must be bouncing them off walls or something - I’ve never seen so many bad reviews before for one product. Did you all lose share in Western Digital or something?
I had two WD MyBooks (one old 500GB with the green circle-light bought in Europe and one 750 Gb with the dual blue circle-light bought in the States) and they died on me the same day. The smaller one had been running for over a year and started doing the clicking sound when it died. The 750 was much younger, maybe 8 months old. That one just stopped showing up in windows. I tried and tried to get it to work (I had reformatted it to NTFS in the beginning) and once in a while it was found but only as a RAW drive with nothing on it. I managed to get the 500Gb replaced from the dealer here in Iceland but the 750Gb was bought in the States so I couldn’t return it. I was pissed when I read this site so I attacked it with a couple of screewdrivers and tore it apart. Now I have the naked HDD in my hand and soon I’m gonna connect it to a CPU and see if my stuff is there. It better be! I’ve 5 WD-HDD and they all work fine. It’s that damn MyBook crap that i’m never ever buying again!
Hi! to all people who bought the WD 1T. I bought this one few weeks ago. Just like you guys when I plug in, it does not appear on my laptop, althought it said on the box that it was formatted for XP etc. I go to “support.wdc.com” to get help. I was advised to format the WD again. I did the format and now it’s working fine. I don’t know how long it last as some others in this forum said but it’ working fine now. If you have re-format then give it a go. Nothing to loose mate. Good luck.
The housing of the Western digital MyBook is to small and is from a wrong material so the Harddisk is getting to hot!
After a few months, maybe 1 or 2 years YOUR harddisk will certainly die!!!
Put your eSATA-harddisk for example in a ANTEC-MX 1 housing; your problems will be OVER for EVER!
http://www.antec.com/usa/productDetails.php?lan=us&id=77150
If you use the USB 2.0 connection:
Don’t use the harddisk longer than 30 minutes when copying large files and keep it in a cool place.
If you have an option: Use ALWAYS the eSATA connection; you can watch the harddisk temperature with:
http://www.hdtune.com/
The simple version is free of charge!
And remember:
1 Back-Up is NO Back-Up!
Use always 2 separate harddisks if you can afford to lose your data!
Good Luck!
Slip off the pen: must be:
Use always 2 separate harddisks if you can’t afford to lose your data!
I got a My Book Premium Edition II about six months ago. It’s the 1 TB with RAID feature. I did have a lot of problems installing it, since I didn’t read the instructions well enough. The key is to install the software first, and later plug My Book in. Otherwise it doesn’t work.
Anyway, after working out that problem I started using it. And I must say I am very pleased with this product. I even started using it as Photoshop Scratch Disk and it work perfectly and extremly fast.
Never let me down. To sum up - I’ve never had bad experience with WD.
A few days ago I even got another My Book, smaller, and a lot more compact, since Premuim II is quite big, due to the two disks inside.
I lost 5 years work that I entrusted to a WD MyBook 500.
During a simple data transfer (isn’t that it’s job?) it destroyed it’s own MBR and I have lost everything.
I have a couple of others that are still working, but now I live in fear!