Faulty drive, or faulty enclosure?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Hi,

Recently, my four year old 1Tb WD MyBook suddenly stopped working on my PC. It was fine one moment then while accessing a folder, Explorer went very slowly and crashed. The drive hasn’t worked properly since.

When I connect it to a PC or laptop, it comes up as a virtual CD drive labelled as SmartWare as well as a hard drive. Accessing either causes Explorer to hang.

I have tried to use TestDisk and DLGDIAG but both programs hang until the drive is switched off or unplugged, then they suddenly work as normal.

The drive itself doesn’t seem to be making the usual horrible tell-tale sounds of a failing drive, so I’m wondering is if its the enclosure itself that’s failed or the drive.

Is there a way to test this? Is it a simple matter of taking the drive out of the case and using a usb sata interface to access the file?

Thanks!

2

If the drive stills under warranty, I wouldn’t recommend taking the drive out of the enclosure as this will void the warranty of the unit.

As a recommendation, create a case with support to see what they can do for you.