My Book Essentials - Broken USB connection

I just can’t believe this. 

Broken USB = Not able to access my files.

I can’t believe that more people aren’t absolutely livid about this. How dare western digital encrypt my files without my explicit permission. I should be able to pull that drive, plug it straight in and retrieve my files.

The irony is that I had just bought a second My Book Essentials to back the family photos up onto, and was planning on doing it this weekend.

Now I have to pay a bunch of money to get the USB soldered back on, even though the reason it is not working is because it is a faulty product to begin with.

I was a big fan of WD until this episode. I will never buy your products again. 

Sorry dude, but next time remember to always keep a backup of your data and never to trust a single internal/external drive,  no matter the brand.

That’s not the point.

My files are fine, just encrypted to their broken casing. They’ve basically put a lock on my data. IT’S MINE.

Why should I pay for this? The only reason is because I’ll never get anyone on the phone to give enough of a **bleep** to remedy the situation.

So now I’ve got to:

a) buy a new drive.

b) pay to get the old one fixed.

c) remove all the files from my old mybooks in case the same thing happens. (Requiring another 2 drives.)

The standard - “It’s all your fault dummy.” - reply doesn’t wash with me. There are a LOT of customers out there who wouldn’t even know that there was a chance the drive will fail.

This is ridiculous. It’s only a matter of time before the USB goes on these things.

There are going to be a lot of very upset customers. Do they really not care about the business they are going to lose?

Or is this just a massive oversight in which case they should be providing a remedy to their customers,

Like - “Sorry, yeah that shouldn’t happen. Send us the enclosure. We’ll resolder it, pay the postage and send it back.”

I guess it is lost future sales vs cost of repair.

I would estimate that I would have purchased 4 - 5 externals over the next 5 years that I won’t be purchasing now.

vs the cost of sorting the issue out and *I know this is ridiculous* but DOING THE RIGHT THING by a loyal customer.

I don’t know of any HD maker that has free data recovery. You better check out other drives first. I’ve seen the broken USB port and corrupt data posts on the Seagate forums too. I’ve warned a lot of people here who want to move their important data to their new HD to free up space to make sure they have at least 2 copies. Mark Twain said  “The man who sets out to carry a cat by the tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.”

Joe

boosterkitty wrote:

That’s not the point.

 

My files are fine, just encrypted to their broken casing. They’ve basically put a lock on my data. IT’S MINE.

 

Why should I pay for this? The only reason is because I’ll never get anyone on the phone to give enough of a **bleep** to remedy the situation.

 

So now I’ve got to:

 

a) buy a new drive.

b) pay to get the old one fixed.

c) remove all the files from my old mybooks in case the same thing happens. (Requiring another 2 drives.)

 

The standard - “It’s all your fault dummy.” - reply doesn’t wash with me. There are a LOT of customers out there who wouldn’t even know that there was a chance the drive will fail.

 

This is ridiculous. It’s only a matter of time before the USB goes on these things.

 

There are going to be a lot of very upset customers. Do they really not care about the business they are going to lose?

 

Or is this just a massive oversight in which case they should be providing a remedy to their customers,

 

Like - “Sorry, yeah that shouldn’t happen. Send us the enclosure. We’ll resolder it, pay the postage and send it back.”

 

I guess it is lost future sales vs cost of repair.

 

I would estimate that I would have purchased 4 - 5 externals over the next 5 years that I won’t be purchasing now.

 

vs the cost of sorting the issue out and *I know this is ridiculous* but DOING THE RIGHT THING by a loyal customer.

I beg to differ, as the core fact remains the same: You should take whatever precautions needed to keep your files safe.

If you have a backup, then the drive can fail 2 million times for any given reason and still you don’t lose a single picture. I’ve lost files on the past for blindly trusting a single drive, now I have 4 copies on 4 separate places of all my data… I’m making sure to protect it and not having to worry about data recovery. Take the advice (for next time_,_ for the future) or leave it; your data is the one on risk if you don’t take care of it.

Oh, and by the way, the hard drive is sold with a 256-bit hardware-based AES encryption feature. You should know before you got the drive what that means, implies and prevents. It’s made that way on purpose to prevent data recovery by taking the drive out, as the encryption would be pointless if it could by bypassed with such an easy method, just so you know.

There is little you can do with this drive and your data inside, but you can do a lot more to take care of your files if you make sure to have at least two separate copies, no matter the method. Your future data is in your hands, I’m sorry you had to learn the hard way like many others.

Hey listen Pizza Face, we’re not all a bunch of dorks with nothing better to do than sit around in a Hard Drive forum, giving I-TOLD-YOU-SO’s to people who have just lost files.

Most of WD’s customers wouldn’t even know that the files are being encrypted to the PCB board. That’s not ignorance, that’s just people’s default understanding.

Even the guy I just spoke to at WD is insisting that the files don’t get encrypted to the case. So he doesn’t know any better, and he’s tech support. 

The arse of it all is that it’s unnecessary, I at no stage chose to encrypt my files.

And if you read my post, you’d know that I had already bought another enclosure to back the files up, so I don’t need lectures about it.

boosterkitty wrote:
…I at no stage chose to encrypt my files…

 Er, no… you chose to do it the moment you decided to pay extra for a hardware password-equipped drive, instead of paying less for a bare drive.

If you had no clue what you were purchasing, that’s nobody’s fault but your own.

Have a look: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/external/desktop/

You’ll see something silly like this:

So, yes… you chose to allow hardware encryption the moment you chose the MBE.

I have many MBE drives, going back several years, and I’ve not managed to break any of the USB ports off… so I’ve never had to solder a port back on (or pay someone else to).  And the drives get swapped between 3 PCs and 2 WDTVs quite regularly.  It’s hard to comprehend how the port gets snapped off so easily by some folks.

And you might want to try being a little more respectful, like you agreed to be when you signed up.

I shall close this thread (For now) before the conversation gets personal.

Regards,

boosterkitty, I would suggest you to contact WD directly that the USB port on your External Hard Disk Drive broke almost right after the purchase, the Agent will inform you how to proceed. You can do so either by phone or email.

To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en

Regards,