My 1TB My Passport for Mac works fine for a week or so then fails. I force eject, disconnect, reconnect, re-select in Time Machine and it works fine again-for anywhere from a day to a week or more-then it happens again. I have done this a dozen times or more, even returned the drive for a new one twice.
Hi Archer52,
Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this.
To Contact WD for Technical Support
https://support.wdc.com/support/case.aspx?lang=en
The link below will allow you to call support.
My WD Black drives (two of them) work fine for a couple of weeks, then hang the whole system when the Time Machine tries to access it for a periodic backup. It took me months to figure out my system hangs were caused by a stuck WD drive. Tech support told me to ask here, they didn’t understand my description of the problem.
Does this sound like what your Passport is doing? Does it fail to spin up and give access when the Time Machine needs it?
I am going on two weeks and it is still working ok. The drive isn’t damaged, as far as “not spinning up”. I did uninstall the WD Utilities about a week ago. Keeping my fingers crossed-
My drive is not damaged either. But every time the Time Machine needs to access it, it has to respond to the request for access. It does this every 15 minutes every day. Then, every few weeks, it doesn’t respond properly, and the computer hangs up. If I look at the Sidebar, I can see the WD drive is active, and the Time Machine is starting up, but it’s unable to proceed. I can hear the drive going “tick… tick … tick” as if it’s retrying to access. Is this similar to what yours is doing? It works okay most of the time, but then you are unable to access it until you force eject it and reconnect. Does the drive show as being active in the Sidebar? In my case, I can free up the computer eventually by typing control-command-eject several times, and after several minutes, the WD drive lets go and everything is fine. I do not need to eject it and reconnect.
