Its pretty much as it says… I have used this system for the last 4~ years, with no issues with any of my other USB 3.0 devices (flash drives, another small er external, a card reader, a camera, a phone… and a few other things I cant remember at the moment) HOWEVER, I plugged in the drive using the USB ports on the back of my system, there are 4 of them, only one was in use, nothing happened… no finding hardware wizard or anything?
So I repeated the process on all 4, nada! So I go to plug in my other USB device back in, its a WiFi adapter, nada, no internet! So I went to Device Manager, went to USB devices… The only remaining ports belong to the front mounted USB ports!!!
I honestly cant expect WD to replace my motherboard (been a tech for 10 years, did take it out tried cleaning it, checked the caps, looked for burn-outs, shorts, among other things, still dead…), but I wanted to let anyone else out there know that if you dont see your drive show up when you plug it in to a USB 2.0 port, its ENTIRELY possible that the USB ports on your system have now been taken out instead of a simple drive or cord/power/partition issue!
Now I bought it because it was USB 2.0 compatible and I needed to move 2TB~ of data off of the system prior to switching over to my laptop with its USB 3.0 ports, this however has now been mothballed until a later date.
I have seen reports similar to mine on Newegg and other review sites, and I honestly think they should pull the USB 2.0 compatibility claim.
EDIT: Some more information- Plugged into my USB 3.0 laptop it works fine, without issue, yes I have a Y cable, both systems are Windows 7 x64
EDIT2: The images below are from Device manager. the Left image is the “before” image, it was actually taken after, I just used the nifty “devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices” and “show hidden hardware” features, and of course the right image is the after picture… where there are no USB devices at all… (I nuked the front ones in an attempt using a USB 3.0 wall charger to suppliment power with the Y cable, next attempt is a USB PCIe card…)
