Disappointed with WD My Passport

I started buying the WD Passport about 5 years ago and I have to say all of them have failed me, causing the loss of important files of all kind. I got to return some of them but they broke again just like the previous ones. I even returned one at the end of last year and two months later it broke too. I have to make sure  you understand that none of them had been damaged by falling down or anything like that. I take good care of this kind of stuff.

My last “leap of faith” with the WD passports was buying 2 Passports Ultra that SO FAR have been working fine. I just had them for 6 months, so the last word still haven’t been said… although I really have a feeling this time they got it right.

But back to all the previous ones, the reason I wrote this post is to find out if the same experience had happened to others. And I would also like to complain to the makers of this specific product since you offer a one year guarantee but what that should also come with a data recovery put back into the replacement you send to really make up for the “Real” money I lost because of your bad product.

Hello,

I recommend maintaining a backup of your data at all times, as a best practice to ensure the availability of your information and minimal potential data loss. There are many variables that can result in a failed drive, such as power outages, accidental physical damage, internal component failure, and computer viruses, just to name a few. In any scenario, data recovery is not a failsafe.

Backups are recommended at all times. 

Regards,

The first two passports I bought were, ONE to storage information. The Second to backup the first one. They both broke. So there goes your backup theory!

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Same thing happened to me - just quit, with no physical damage done to it.  I’m on my 3rd…

Same here.  Best luck so far with my several Passports was the one which failed today, which I think has been in service for close to 9 months.  But like the others, at some point my laptop stops recognizing it, then I get a popup telling me I must format the drive.

The first time this happened to me, a friend who is more knowledgable than me used some sort of drive tools I am not familiar with, and as I recall he told me the FAT was scrambled beyond recognition. Either the FAT, or some lookup table.

This time around I was very careful with the drive. Instead of velcro-ing it to the lid of my laptop, I carried it around separately, and never plugged in or unplugged the drive while the laptop was running. But it still failed.

I use it mostly for storing my close to 1 TB of music files, which I use for DJing at dances. I backup continuously with Backblaze, an online backup service.

I am thinking seriously about getting a LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 2 TB drive.  Costs a lot more than the WD equivalent, but if it never fails then that is the one I need.

https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10629

I have almost everything backed up with Backblaze, but restoring online to a new drive is tedious at my DSL speed (5 Mbps). The other option is $189 to Backblaze, and they FedEx a 4 TB drive with all the files, as they were yesterday.

This will be expensive ($299 for new drive, $189 to Backblaze) but I just don’t have time for this.

I will say that WD has been very good about replacing the bad drives.  But the data is the really valuable part. Thank God it didn’t fail during my debut at Om Fusion 2 weeks ago.

Wish me luck!

Well this is my opinion keep in mind the USB port itself is not well designed for constant connect/disconnect like audio video  equipment is. I had one go bad on a USB powered DVD hooked to a desktop. Since these drives are not cooled they are intended more for backups than using for constant use like playing audio and vidoe files. FAT32 is known to corrupt more frequently than NTFS. People don’t always disconnect the drives correctly either. I do think WD should look at finding a way to attach the USB port more securely to the circuit board than just the soldered joint. Possibly adding a boss in the case to add support to the back side of USB port.

Joe