MyBook 1 TB essential - disaster

Here is my story:

Bought ByBook 1TB about 6 months ago. Use it exclusively as storage for WDTV live. Worked fine until yesterday.

Something went wrong in it and now freezes my WDTV and freezes my PC as well. When I try to access files Windows explorer stop responding.

No, I didn’t drop it , I didn’t even touch it since I bought it.

Somehow I managed to upgrade firmware but that didn’t help.

I tried to scan drive for errors: it started to scan and after about 10% scan speed dropped to impossible slow. So slow it would take about 3 month to finish.

It looks like hardware is [deleted].  I am about to loose my data. :cry:  

Nice work Western Digital ! :angry:

THE SAME THING JUST HAPPENED TO ME THIS MORNING!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALMOST A WHOLE TB OF MUSIC, MOVIES, PHOTOS MAY BE GONE FOREVER. WHAT IS GOING ON WITH WESTERN DIGITAL. A LOT OF MY MEDIA IS IRREPLACIBLE AND I AM PISSED OFF. ANY HELP OUT THERE WOULD BE APPRECIATED. EVEN TO JUST ACCESS MY FILES TO PUT ON ANOTHER HARD DRIVE.

Hello all,

User from Portugal.
I bought a WD MyBook Essential 1.5TB about a month ago. (WDBAAF0015HBK-EESN  †
WMAVU2594257)

I took about a day to figure that the drive was messed up.
Loooooong access times to the drive, that is, when i could access it.
The rare occasions i got to initiate a file transfer it showed unreal time
estimates. I once tried to transfer a 5 GB block o files (music etc), it indicated
a 165 minutes estimation!
I have 4 different PC’s at home, tried the device on all of them, and in all
the behaviour was quite the same: frustrating.

So, after a grueling week around the **bleep** thing i went back to the store, and exchanged the drive by the 1TB drive from the same series (WDBAAF0010HBK-EESN  † WCAV5C989035).

The drive seems ok, at least untill present time, but i don’t keep it constantly connected to the PC, and i use it as a backup drive, not as unique store drive.
And that’s exactly what i needed the drive! Not for backup!
Reading the WD support forums and seeing other users reports about dying drives after 6 months leaves me very skeptical as to delete the files at their original storage. Very.
The feeling i got is that the drive is going to die, sooner than admissible for a hard drive as we, experienced users, grew used to.

I still don’t know what got into me for buying these drives. Western Digital is not the only company under fire about these high density drives. If you google up some other models, from other manfacturers you realise it is a widespread problem.
They simply want to put the products out there regardless of their reliability!

I remember the time hard drives were much smaller capacity and endured 10 years. Constantly ON!

So, advice to EVERYONE who goes to a store and reads this phrase on the product box:

“Put your life on it”

…Well… DON’T.

Best Regards ( and luck ! )