I did the same thiing as NoSleepHD with a windows task, wrote a file with date&time every few minutes - while it kept it from sleeping, the drive still overheated when it did get used and would still shut down. Since I moved it to a new enclosure with cooling, I have not had to use anything like NoSleepHD since, it just works.
I have pair of My Book 1TB drives connected through an eSATA card to my computer. I’m running Windows 7 64-bit. My motherboard is a Gigabyte P55M-UD2. My eSATA ports are on a Vantec UGT-ST310R card. I have the latest firmware on the My Book drives. I’ve used eight of them for a long time on previous hardware connected to the USB ports on those machines. Now the drives go to sleep for no good reason and sometimes diaappear completely. This frequently causes very slow shutdowns and on two occassions has crashed Windows 7. There is a problem here and the common thread is the Western Digital My Book hard drives.
hi,
i would strongly advice to anyone considering to buy this drive NOT do do so. i’ve had many issues with it even after update’s. if you would have to keep the drive alive with a program that writes to the drive every minute this would just be ignoring the real issue. i can’t believe there is nobody looking into this to really solve the (what i asume to be compatibility )issue.
just to point out that it’s not my pc only i’ve tried on 2 others and have exactly the same issue including connecting through firewire or USB…
the last thing i want to note is the actual write/read speed of this disk is also very low (esata).
so if you want a drive that hangs most of the time and causes the pc to slow down to P1 performance and if you like slow read/write speeds this is the drive to go for.
i got myself an internal drive instead and this offcourse works fine.
this crappy drive will now just function as a secondary Backup for old files.
good luck to anyone using this as primary backup.
cheers.
Perhaps, hoping against hope that TechieInCalgary will get this. Why doesn’t the My Book exhibit protective thermal shutdowns when using USB? How can different bus technologies cause the drive to get hotter than another bus implementation. Also, why does it seem that protective thermal shutdowns always seem to occur when the My Book is idle for a while? You would think the opposite.
@JfBoise Quote: “Perhaps, hoping against hope that TechieInCalgary will get this. Why doesn’t the My Book do exhibit protective thermal shutdowns when using USB? How can different bus technologies cause the drive to get hotter than another bus implementation. Also, why does it seem that protective thermal shutdowns always seem to occur when the My Book is idle for a while? You would think the opposite.”
I have email notifications on apparently.
I don’t know why it doesn’t tend to to the shutdowns with USB, though there are at least two possible reasons:
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An educated guess is that the driver card that goes between the drive and USB or eSATA runs hotter when doing eSATA than USB and that is just enough in addition to the thermal contribution of the drive in conjunction with the lack of convective and conductive cooling to put the drive into thermal shutdown. There are a lot more signals to source/sink for eSATA than USB.
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There is typically higher data throughput rates with eSATA than USB, so there is more activity digitally and physically to generate heat with eSATA.
I no longer am in the hardware business, so I’m not entirely current anymore, though I used to do hardware development. I haven’t the tools etc. to do any low level testing to determine exactly why this is happening. That would be something WD should have done, be doing or what have you since they have the knowledge and equipment.
I didn’t see the situation you describe, that it seemed to occur when the drive is idle. Mine would happen when a defrag or virus scan started overnight or sometimes when I was working with virtual machines during the day, so the drive was *extremely* busy, especially during the defrag or when using the VM doing reads *and* writes.
All I can speak of is my experience, and the essence of that is *still* that I removed the physical drive from the enclosure, put it into a cooled enclosure that has direct eSATA connectivity (no translation card I believe) and I have not had a single shutdown since. I also have not had the read/write problems that preceeded the failure of my previous drive.
The only differences therefore are the lack of the IO card and the cooling in the enclosure. I will also note that the drive is running at a pretty constant 27 degrees C, which I can monitor using SMART tools through eSATA with this setup.
I’m not trying to bash WD, nor am I trying to re-engineer a solution for people. I just wanted to find one that worked for me and which I could offer as a suggestion to other people to try. A cheap one at that!
TechieInCalgary, thanks for the response. Just to let everybody know, I only experienced the dropout/disconnect (that required a reboot to recover) when the drive sat idle for a while. I even did a check disk over the eSate connection (using a six foot eSata cable) that took all night. The check disk completed without errors found. I bet the problem is in the IO card that is housed in the WD My Book case. And it’s always better to run cooler. I just wished WD stepped up, admitted something was wrong with the drive and offered a solution. Instead, they stay silent which leads me to talk with my wallet… no more WD drives for me or my friends who ask for my advice. WD, see how that works?
TechieInCalgary, thanks for your well informed speculation of the issue; it’ll probably put this thread to bed.
JofBoise
I guess the test for that would have been to take the drive and controller out of the enclosure and run it loose on the desk. That would be adequate cooling and would be one more piece of information as to whether it was cooling or not. I don’t think I have the parts anymore to do the test though 
I ended up buying an enclosure from another company that supports esata, usb and has a fan (also pretty blue lights). After removing the drive out of the WD enclosure, I could see why there might have been a heat related issue. Inside is pretty packed, leaving little room for airflow, and the pads on the bottom of the enclosure really don’t allow much air to come from underneath. The think WD may have had a bug in their interface card (P/N 4060-705016-004 Rev. A) when using the SATA connector; a bug that may have been affected by heat. Also, because I’m using a different enclosure, I didn’t need the WD manager software and therefore was able to uninstall it. Less software is always better as well. It also could have contributed to the problem (and BSODs). Anyways, so far with the new enclosure, no drop outs.
