I bought the Passport Essential external hard drive about nine months ago and have wasted many hours trying to get it to work ever since. I have a Mac but should that really be a problem? I spent the first 48 hours trying to format the thing and from then on it has behaved like a bad drunk in a mood. I tried it alongside Time Capsule but after three weeks I was told that it had run out of memory to continue despite the fact that it contained 500GB’s. It’s a horrible product and should be avoided at all costs. Mac users should leave it well alone and PC people should spend their $100 on a nice night out instead. A fantastic bit of garbage in blue, black and red!
Did you ever contact Tech Support about this, or ever consider getting the drive replaced? Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.
To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en
Considering the great (lack of) response I’m getting after having written three times to WD support AND here in the board, yes, maybe it’s way better to just consider it a fancy paper weight.
I went through the same thing.
Support wasn’t helpful. After suggesting some meaningless workarounds (not solutions) which didn’t work they advised me to return my drives.
I have since bought four Seagate drives which work perfectly out of the box with all of my Macs… no problems, no retarded Smartware or firmware updates and no wasted hours trying to get a drive to work the way it should.
Bill,
While WD will replace a drive the reality is people need to be able to trust these drives in case of a total systems failure. Data recovery is hugely expensive, an dthats even if it can be done. Thats why were all buying ext drives to back up our important data. This is not a personal insult against you do dont delete my post.
But in esscence this is the whole issue. These drives cannot be trusted with keeping important data and were all relying more and more on computers in our lives.
In all my years of using PC and MAC I have never once had an internal drive failure. On my PC I still back up internally but I do want to move away from that becasue I will soon be going SSD and I know that they can suddenly be wiped out. The technology is new, but its the way of the future I can see that but I know there have been some disasters with people using SSD drives. I need a 100% reliable ext backup drive solution just like everyone else. I want only one drive in my computer instead of the four I currently have (PC) and just back up and drag files from external source when I need them so that working files are read from the ultra fast SSD. But right now all these ext drives from all companies just seem to be very poorly made and unreliable.
Is it the pwer supplies? A poorly made power supply will give any computer lots of problems so it stands to reason the same would apply for ext drives. Im assuming the drives are the same as the ones WD sell for internal install and I have never had a WD internal go down (touch wood).
Is it the connections? A power surge (again back to the power supply) can break drive easily
I think its obvious though that all of the companies now getting their stuff made in China and Taiwan at the lowest possible price is the reason. A little comprimise here, a little cut there, but as long as the box looks good the public wont know that inside the enclosure is a deadly demon just waiting to wipe out your data.
But then again I cant even blame the companies entirely. We decadent westerners (no pun intended) are demanding cheaper and cheaper goods. So, were getting what we pay for it seems.
Alternatively you can set up a raid, and hope that at least a certain amount of drives live. Rather than depend on the one drive, you can hope that one drive in a system lives, if you use raid 1.
I’m not ready to soak it…yet. I was down to 2Gigs of memory, and thought if I could back up all my hard drive to this massive storage disk, that I could erase my laptop of all that stuff…
Well, after successfully backing up my laptop (WD said it was successful), I erased my photos in iPhoto. Then before erasing anything else, I launched iPhoto and sure enough, it was empty–no folders, no dates, names, nothing. So far so good. Then, I thought I’d do a “restore” of the photos to their original places to see how this thing does its job.
It restored everything: library, events, dates, times, for all 26,000 world-class photos (really)…the only problem?
NO PHOTOS!!! each photo is full of all data about it, but where is the photo?
Please help me on this one.
Creole.
