I use a WD My Book with my mac, to store my iTunes and iPhotos libraries and files. It’s been working fine for several years, but lately, the My Book keeps getting hung up. How this will manifest itself is that if I am using iTunes or iPhoto, I’ll get the interminable spinning wheel and have to Force Quit as the program will show as Not Responding. At this point, if I attempt to open My Book it will also crash the Finder. I’ll have to restart my computer, uplug and restart the external drive as well to try to get it working again.
I’ve run the Disk Utility on the My Book and sometimes it will show as perfectly fine with no issues, and on other occasions I’ll get the error that the drive cannot be mounted or unmounted, and one time got the error that the drive was corrupt and needed to be reformatted (though when I ran the Disk Utility on it just 10 minutes later it said the drive was fine).
Welcome to the Community.
Disk Utility will check the drive’s file system, not the hard drive’s physical integrity. Depending on the generation of your WD My Book I’d recommend using WD Drive Utilities or WD SmartWare to tun a S.M.A.R.T. test on your unit. If it fails, the unit should be replaced.
http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?lang=en
I ran the diagnostic tests in SmartWare. The Quick SMART status and Quick Drive test passed fine, but after the Complete Drive Test it said Complete Drive Test failed, with no further info.
When I open WB Drive Utilities, it says “Attach a supported WD drive,” even though the drive is attached and I can see it on my desktop.
Then this drive uses WD SmartWare for diagnostics.
I failed complete test is an early indication if drive aging. I’d recommend replacing the unit under warranty.
Additional information is available in the following link:
http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=8
