Elements drives won't wake up

Portable Drives My Passport
1

Hi,

I have a pair of 14TB Elements external drives connected to a Synology NAS server for storing backups. This all works fine except for one issue. If I have to restart the NAS, the USB drives seem to go to sleep or maybe turn off (the white power LED goes off) and the only way to get them to turn back on is to re-connect the USB cables or cycle the power to the drives. Then they they work fine again.

Does anyone know why this is happening and know how I can prevent or recover from it without having to physically reconnect them. It’s rather a pain to have to drive for an hour to a remote site just to turn them off and on again.

I’ve previously used Samsung drives for the same purpose and they didn’t suffer from this issue. So this appears to be a “feature” of these WD drives.

Thanks.

2

Hi,

Please refer to the following KB article:

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11449

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/21348

3

Thanks but the drives are already set to not go to sleep in the OS. That was the first thing I tried.

Also, other makes of drives I’ve used didn’t require sleep to be disabled and they were USB bus powered, portable drives. So they should be more susceptible to this kind of issue. I’ve only experienced this issue with these WD drives.