I have the same problem with my WD My Passport 1Tb (WDBBEP0010BBK-03). Keeps randomly disconnecting after the PC has been running a few hours. But mine never re-connects. I have to unplug & re-plug in the drive to get it to wake up.
I’ve only had it about 6 months, and its been doing this constantly & randomly for the last 2-3 monhts. I’m running Win7/64bit Ultimate. I went thru their entire knowledge base, and the only thing closest is a report of USB3.0 drive disconnecting & reconnecting due to USB power management issues. But mine is USB2.0 & I have power management turned off & the drive set to never sleep.
Also, there are 100’s of people having this problem with WD My Passport external drives. There are a ton of posts on Microsoft, tech bulletin Boards, chat rooms, and blogs. Even on Apple/Mac support sites tons of people are reporting this problem. Even here on WD community message boards there are at least 25-50 reports of this exact same problem. What is WD doing about this? What is the resolution?
These drives are used for backups & data storage. This issue is putting both business users & home users at significant risk. What is the point of getting a drive from WD, when it cannot stay only online long enough for backups or data storage file transfers to even work. I’ve looked at 100’s of complaints about this, and no one seems to be getting answers, support, or resolution.
The Tech/IT community is talking about never using WD drives again & are informing their customers & users to do the same. The word is getting out that these My Passport drives are no good & are constant problems. What is WD doing about this? My issue has been going on for months & I’ve wasted 100’s of hours researching and dealing with this problem!
There have been suggestions on here to buy a ‘power booster’ cable. Why do customers need to buy a special cable that connects to 2 USB ports? Does not the WD product work as intended when connected to a USB port? Was the WD product not designed to operate on standard USB power? If not, this should be noted in the product documentation and the special cable should be supplied with the product.
Plus, I think that is bogus, because I have another WD My Passport hooked up to the same computer using the same USB ports, and it is not having a problem at all. I bought this one several months before the one that is failing. They are nearly identical products. One is 750Gb WDBBEP7500ABK-01 (works fine) and the second is 1Tb WDBBEP0010BBK-03 (is failing). I’ve swapped ports, the problem follows the drive. The drive are 0748 & 07A8.
If it were a power problem, wouldn’t the 750Gb drive be having the same problem? Btw, I have already swapped cables out. The cable has nothing to do with it.
It appears this problem has been going on for a couple years, happens on USB2.0 & USB3.0, on Win7, Vista, XP, & Mac, on USB ports directly on the computer, as well as un USB hubs. Cables have been swapped. Drivers have been updated, new drive firmware has been installed, Windowds registry tweaks have been done, and many other things. The common denominator is the WD My Passport drive. They disconnect or quit talking to the OS continually, and have to be unplugged & replugged in to get the drives working again. The sometimes reconnect again, and become intermittent, but mostly they just disconnected. This is seriously looking like a WD drive issue.
In the last 2 years, WD has not been able to solve the issue & so many users in this community still down have answers. What is WD doing about this & are they ever going to resolve this issue. Otherwise WD should recall the product & give refunds to all the customers that have purchased these horrible drives. Customers really need support on this and a permanent resolution to this ongoing nightmare.
My PC is Win7 64bit Ultimate, nVidia 680i SLI mobo, 8Gb Ram, Quad Core Q6700 Intel processor 2.66Ghz (intell 775 socket). USB2.0 ports.
