I used to think that Western Digital were the best drives available. However, since 2011, I’ve been having a consistent problem with almost every single WD external drive I’ve owned. It started in December of 2011 when one of them just stopped being recognized by my pc. The drive seemed to be running, and the pc recognized that there was a device connected, but wouldn’t load a driver, and the device wouldn’t show up as a drive, so you couldn’t access it. I was able to retrieve the contents of the drive only by connecting it to a mac, where it still showed up, and copying them over to a new drive. The drive wouldn’t show up on any PC that I connected it to. Western Digital RMA’d the drive and gave me a refurb, which I’ve been using as a backup drive ever since.
Fast forward to 2013: I’ve now had this happen to 3 WD drives in the past few months. However, I’ve just figured out that if you remove the drive, unplug the power cord and then plug it back in, the PC will now recognize the device and load the driver. The problem is, with one particular WD drive, this is happening on almost a daily basis. It’s quite annoying that I have to keep unplugging and replugging in the drive’s power cord as a normal routine. It should be noted that this same things happens on multiple PCs, not just one.
One other thing I’ve noticed is that this NEVER happens with the RMA drive I received in December of 2011. The big difference between that one and the ones that keep getting dropped? It uses a standard USB cord to connect. The ones that DO get dropped are using the more modern Western Digital connector cable.
I haven’t found this particular problem addressed in the forums. Has anyone else had this problem? Is this a known issue? Is there a fix for it? Or should I just stick to other brands from now on?