I’m now on my 3rd 5TB My Passport drive, all 3 apparently DOA. All 3 clicked frequently, new out of the box. I seems highly unlikely I received 3 defective/damaged drives.
I wonder whether the issue is the drives not getting enough power. They were attached to a PCI USB 3.0 expansion card with 5 external USB ports. All 5 USB ports are in-use with older & smaller WD passport drives, all powered solely by the USB ports (i.e. no external power cord). That expansion card also receives power independently from the power supply.
How much power does a My Passport drive consume? Can a single expansion card drive five My Passport drives?
Can’t give you a definite answer, but I also have PCI USB 3.0 expansion card with 5 external USB ports.
In the past, i had no issues with plugging in multiple WD USB Portable drives.
But, now, i’m having the issue if i plug in 2 of them at the same time, they start beeping due to lack of power.
If i plug only 1 WD USB Portable in … it works fine.
The strange thing is, everything used to work fine with older smaller drives and newer larger drives.
Anyways, swapped the PCI USB Card with a different one, same problem
Plan to swap my PC Desktop Power Supply to a higher wattage as i think it’s the cause of the problem.
Side Note: I can plug 2 WD Drives that “beep” when plugged into my PC and plug the both into my PlayStation 4 console, and they don’t beep and work fine. So, i really suspect it’s my PC’s power supply that’s dodgy.
I have a fairly new 850W power supply. I was also thinking about replacing the PCI USB card, but I assume most of them are made by the same Chinese manufacturer.
I can have 5 WD USB drives plugged in without issues, just not the new 5TB drive.
