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.
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:<