Hi,
I know the WD My Book Studio is a ‘designed for Mac’ external drive, but… it is a hard disk and it was the best one available in the local PC World with 4TB space. A quick remormat from HDFS to NTFS and job was a good one, or so goes the theory. I’m beginning to regret this purchase decision. Yet my expereience of other WD products is good, so this is disappointing.
The issue, which is well documented on both your site and elsewhere on the web, is the drive goes to sleep and will not wake up once it has slept.
My use case was to use the drive to host Hyper-V based guest OS’ as the space constraints on my PC system disk are limited. I currently can’t do this because of the sleep problem.
My PC is a GigaByteGB- BXi7-4770R. 16GB RAM 250GB mSATA SSD. The BIOS setting for xHCI is set to Auto, the only other setting is Smart-Auto. I’ve tried both and both result in the same sleep problem.
My OS is Windows 8.1 Update 1. Have have set the power settings to ‘High Performance’ and both the Hard Disk Sleep and USB Selective Sleep set to “Off”.
I’ve tried using the WD Windows Software, but this had no impact, the drive continues to sleep.
in terms of physical connections, the WD My Book Studio only has a proprietry WD cable, so I can’t test it with another cable, but the cable, which was new out of the box, looks good, and it does work when the drive is not asleep, and acheives a sustained data transfer rate of 140MB+ second as I transfer OS Guest Images about.
The WD SES Driver is the one supplied with Windows 8.1 Update and has a version of 1, 0, 7, 2 and is supplied by Western Digital. This driver disappears from the PC installation when the My Book Studio sleeps. Installing the drivers manually results in a fault “This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31) The specified request is not a valid operation for the target device”
I have also applied the fix detailed at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/usbcoreblog/archive/2013/11/01/help-after-installing-windows-8-1-my-usb-drive-disappears-or-file-transfers-stop-unexpectedly-r-a-post-title.aspx using PowerShell, to disable sleep. at the drive level. All to no avail.
Lastly, I have also applied the Windows Rollup Up Fixes at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2911106, but even reverting the drive to Windows 8 drive management power behaviour hasn’t worked.
The Challenge
So, I am hoping that Western Digital can rise to the challenge I’m about to set, and create a firmware update for this device that allows your customer to manage the My Book Studio’s sleep settings manually.
- Is WD up for the challenge? or,
- Should I just take the device back to PC World and ask for a refund and buy another device?
Cheers,
Pete
(still a happy WD customer… just )