Hi,
I just purchased this Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1 TB USB 3.0 (WDBACX7500ABK) a few weeks back and it is mainly used for watching movies. It is connected to Samsung 3D LED HDTV (UN55C8000). I am able to see and play the contents in the hard-drive just fine. However, after half an hour or so while the movie is still playing, the harddrive shuts itself down. It causes the “USB” device to disappear in the “Source” and i have to annoyingly getup and go to unplug and plug the hard-drive back in. Has anyone experienced this before? If so, is there any solution? Installing some software maybe?
FYI, I have not installed whatever pre-loaded software in that hard-drive yet. Reason: I just want to make it simple as other hard-drive I own.
Thanks!
As far as I know the drive won’t just spontaneously “sleep” without being told to, so I see 2 possibilities here…
- The TV is erroneously telling it to sleep – seems highly unlikely, and would presumably need new FW for the TV if this really were the case.
- Something is up with the connection… either bad/loose cable, or simply insufficient power to run the drive properly.
Obviously if it’s a bad/loose cable, then either seating both ends properly, or replacing the cable, should fix the problem. If, on the other hand, it’s a power issue, you may be stuck. On a PC or a Laptop, you can get a “Power Booster” cable that connects to 2 USB ports, for when 1 isn’t providing sufficient power… but if the TV only has 1 USB port, you’d be unable to use a power booster. If power’s ultimately the problem and the TV only has one port, all you can really do is use a different external drive that has an external power supply instead.
As far as I can see, a USB port only “has” to provide 0.5A of 5V power as a minimum, but USB-powered drives require up to a full 1.0A.
