No light on cordside edge of a 1T Passport, but a 2nd, 2T one has lights

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I have a 2T Passport that has a solid, slow to fast (when accessing) blink on the cord side edge of the device. However, a similarly new 1T has no light at all.

  • Both units run WD Backup schedules and both are visible thru Win10 Explorer. I can manually see the backup entries in the Backup.swstor folders, and can access files/folders that are additionally stored on the 1T, even with no light.
    1T p/n wdbyvg0010bbk-0b (no lite)
    2T p/n wdbyvg0020bbk-0b (yes lite)

  • Also, I’m I correct that these Passport devices do not have a Sleep Mode (or one that can be controlled)? I did not see any option when I looked at the WD Drive Utilities…settings was grayed out like the erase…although I did read somewhere about Sleep Mode on WD devices.

  • Does the Utilities need to be synced to the drives before use? When I open the utility, I see the 2 passports, but only Diagnose is blue, the other 2 are gray and not pickable.

2

Had a talk with WD Support on the blinking lite missing.

  • Not to worry, should not affect the device as long as you can access it via Explorer or Scheduled Backup.
  • the WD Drive Utility, which had to be downloaded, does have a Setup dropdown that you can set the Sleep Timer (Off or On with up to 90min) and the LED lites on/off. The LED did not work on my 1T but did on the 2T
  • the sleep time setting could be a potential problem for having the scheduled backup not always work. If that drive is sleeping a software initiation may not awaken, like say, when you open the drive for Explorer viewing.
  • Can a running application awake a sleeping drive? Any thoughts?