I recently picked up a two 2 TB WD My Book Essential 1140 drives at an estate sale. They both have low power on hours and the long tests on both of them passed. I’m using one of them now as a backup. I did most of the backups (copying from smaller external drives) on a Dell Inspiron 3583 laptop, and also copied some files from an older Dell OptiPlex 170L desktop with Windows XP on it. When I went to run a Windows backup on an Acer Aspire 1640 from 2008 running Windows 10, it automatically rebooted half way through. I ran the backup two more times, where it also rebooted and soft locked Windows. Even running a virus scan on the My Book caused the computer to crash. Also, trying to copy files from the old external drive that I originally used with that same system over to the My Book caused the computer to restart 1/4 of the way through. I never had an issue with the old external drives, so why was it crashing with the My Book?
Turns out the problem was with the onboard USB controller (nForce 610i) not playing nicely with the My Book. I had a spare USB 2.0 PCI card laying around from 2005. I popped it in the computer, attached the My Book to it, ran a backup and had no issues what so ever. Even the virus scan completed. So my question is… How can I fix the computer or Windows 10 so that the My Book works correctly with the onboard USB controller? Using the PCI card is fine, and I may even buy a USB 3.0 PCIe card, but there maybe times when I might need to plug it directly into the front of the computer, which of course plugs directly into the motherboard.