Yey, I'm finally stumped by something!

Yes, that's right, it's time for YOU to help me solve something
Got a 2tb mybook home edition (triple interface) drive a few weeks back, and it started giving me problems. Would work fine, but then after an hour or so of inuse, it would disconnect itself, and if I reattached it (unplug, then plug back in), it would freeze my system. Both desktop (windows 7) and laptop (vista) suffer the same issue. So I checked to see what SMART said, and it just failed everything. So I RMA'ed the drive and a new one came in. Same issues. But SMART passed this time.

Tried updating firmware from 64bit 7, no luck, you need 32bit vista or xp to work properly. After an hour of fidgeting with it, updated firmware. Hopefully that helps, but not too optimistic about it.

If anyone has ideas, please feel free to share. And no random pc vs mac sidetracks, I'm not going to be replacing my beautiful desktop for one external drive.

One of my computers kills WD drives - every one. I've tried six WD drives and I called WD and they told me that they had seen this in certain chipsets. He told me the drive itself was not failing, it was the SMART controller that was conflicting with the MB controller. And not all WD drives; only certain batches. The drive will slowly fail, will disconnect if its external, and will eventually report "Drive is about to fail." in the SMART prompt. The size of the drive seems to have something to do with the failure occurrence too. The larger the drive the more quickly it would fail.

I switched to Seagate on that computer and haven't seen a drive failure after a year of heavy use.

before you do anything call them and see if its the AC adapter. my 2 lacie drives have had the same syndrome and everytime lacie send me a new adapter (im on my fourth) it works like a charm again!

MaxxuM wrote in post #9505312
One of my computers kills WD drives - every one. I've tried six WD drives and I called WD and they told me that they had seen this in certain chipsets. He told me the drive itself was not failing, it was the SMART controller that was conflicting with the MB controller. And not all WD drives; only certain batches. The drive will slowly fail, will disconnect if its external, and will eventually report "Drive is about to fail." in the SMART prompt. The size of the drive seems to have something to do with the failure occurrence too. The larger the drive the more quickly it would fail.

I switched to Seagate on that computer and haven't seen a drive failure after a year of heavy use.

Maybe, I had a 500gb one before and it worked fine with everything. Also had two 500gb USB drives and they worked fine, as does my 1tb USB and 1tb internal (surprisingly, both show up as the same type of drive when I checked, EAD 1tb). So far the firmware update seems to be working well, so maybe it changes the drive controller just enough to make it work properly.


As for power adapter, no, it's not. I've had power adapter issues before for various things, and this isn't it. I also tried it with three other adapters (all proper voltage and max current) and nothing changed. Also wasn't the cable, since it failed in both eSATA and USB.

I've got a 1Tb My Book Essentials (or something like that, the cheapest My Book version) and when it's plugged into the USB port my computer goes into DELAY mode. Everything I do is delayed, whether it's moving the cursor across the screen or trying to open a program etc. It took me a while to figure out what to blame, but it's the cause. It works fine as a back up HD and it's just about full and will go into storage until needed, but it won't be replaced by another one.

MaxxuM wrote in post #9505312
One of my computers kills WD drives - every one. I've tried six WD drives and I called WD and they told me that they had seen this in certain chipsets. He told me the drive itself was not failing, it was the SMART controller that was conflicting with the MB controller. And not all WD drives; only certain batches. The drive will slowly fail, will disconnect if its external, and will eventually report "Drive is about to fail." in the SMART prompt. The size of the drive seems to have something to do with the failure occurrence too. The larger the drive the more quickly it would fail.

I switched to Seagate on that computer and haven't seen a drive failure after a year of heavy use.

This kinda freaks me out. What chipset?

slitherjef wrote in post #9507912
This kinda freaks me out. What chipset?

The one known to kill WD drives is an nvidia chipset used in core 2 machines (mainly).

Brief update: After installing the 1/27/10 firmware update, the 2tb drive (new one ) is working just fine. Bit slower than before, but no random disconnects even after putting the computer to sleep.

Could it be a Caviar Green with the TLER issue? I know the TLER affect RAID system and not sure if your drive is actually 2x1TB in RAID 0 or 1x2TB.

ZGMF-X20A wrote in post #9530794
Could it be a Caviar Green with the TLER issue? I know the TLER affect RAID system and not sure if your drive is actually 2x1TB in RAID 0 or 1x2TB.

similar issue but it's 1x2tb. after the firmware update, no issues at all. if you get a 2tb mybook, make sure to update the firmware as soon as you get it.

EDIT: reading at 95mb/s for large video files, so I say this drive is now perfect

CORRECTION: not reading at 95mb/s, WRITING at 95mb/s though average is closer to 70mb/s, that time it was just going crazy fast even though it was a 4gb file

I have had terrible luck with WD drives. Got one mybook pro with firewire that I could not get to stay connected to my mac unless I had a cron job "touch" the disk every minute. it worked pretty well over usb2 for about a year until it suddenly died.

Then another mybook that died after one year months with horrible drive noises.

So I switched to a simpletech usb drive that is still working today and also got a portable simpletech that works fine.

Lately I got sucked in again by WD because there was an incredible deal on a 1.5TB with firewire-400 and e-sata. It is currently connected by firewire-400 to my mac mini; hope it can last at least 2 years. I do have a time machine backup to my usb simpletech and archive files montly to another drive at a different physical location. I'm very paranoid with backups.

So my solution is to keep doing RMAs and hope you get a good one and always have a recent backup