I have two 1TB My Passport drives and both keep disconnecting or stop responding after approx 2-3 days of being plugged in. Here is what I have tested:
Connect a single drive directly into the Win7 PC’s USB port - then tried both drives
Connect a single drive to a powered USB hub on a 2nd PC - then tried both drives
Both drives still consistently disconnect or just stop responding
To get them working, I disconnect the drive and then reconnect. These drives are used for backups and the backups are skipped when the drives fail to respond. This is the first USB drive I have ever had this type of problem with and the first I have ever updated the firmware on. The firmware has been updated multiple times to address issues w/ the drive “occasionally failing to re-enumerate”. The firmware readme doc is located @ http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/Win_Univ_FW_Updater_ReleaseNotes_v3.2.0.8D.pdf
I have purchase many WD drives over the years and these two are the first I’ve have seen this type of issue with. If there is anything I can test to reolve this, I am ready to test away. Thanks!
By default, the WD Passport unit have a bulit-in sleep timer enabled by factory, which is triggered based on idle activity, and gets reset if the counter is interrupted because of new activity. Do you encounter the same issue if the sleep timer is disabled on both units?
First generation WD SmartWare Passport units will have the option within WD SmartWare under Settings> Drive settings. If you use a newer unit, then the option will be located in the WD Drive Utilities application instead of WD SmartWare.
Hello - I disabled the timer on both drives usng the WD Drive Utilities. If it stays online for 2-3 days, that is good but what is the next step? I need these to power down since I use them at most for 1-2 hrs a day and all of the other WD Drives I have power down and come back online without any issues.
Hello - Both drives are responding as expected since I disabled the sleep timer. However, now both drives never spin down. I have about 10 other Western Digital drives that can go into sleep mode and come back with no issues (none of them are Passport drives). The 2 Passport drives I have are only used 1-2hrs a day at most - I would like to see if there are any other steps I can try to prevent the issue the drives were having and that would allow them to power down.
On this case I would recommend adjusting the power plan of your system to match your needs. Disk drives are different on functions and sleep behavior, which can affect how long devices will operate along with wake-up behavior.
Hello- After working for a week and making no new changes, the Passport drives are now showing this error message: “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error.” I have 9 other WD (non-Passport) drives and none of them have had these issues but both Passport drives have had issues.
Let me know if there is anything else I can do. Both Passport drives had their sleep policies set to “No Sleep” and I am still seeing issues. If there are any debugging tools I can run for the developers of the firmware to review, I would be more than happy to do so (there are many other posts regarding I/O device errors for the Passport drives).
If there isn’t anything else to try, can we discuss an RMA for these drives (they are less than 1 yr old and under warranty). Thank you!
After a reboot of the system today, the Passport drives failed in under 30min even though the Power Policy is set to “No Sleep” and the PC has all power optimizations disabled. Again, all of the WD Elements and My Book Essential drives are working fine. There are only issues with the WD Passport drives.
I have the exact same problem with my WD My Passport 1Tb (WDBBEP0010BBK-03). Keeps randomly disconnecting after the PC has been running a few hours. But mine never re-connects. I have to unplug & re-plug in the drive to get it to wake up. I’ve only had it about 6 months, and its been doing this constantly & randomly for the last 2-3 monhts. I’m running Win7/64bit Ultimate. Are you finding any answers here? I went thru their entire knowledge base, and the only thing closest is a report of USB3.0 drive disconnecting & reconnecting due to USB power management issues. But mine is USB2.0 & I have power management turned off & the drive set to never sleep.
