Not genuinely Mac compatible

This drive has taught me not to bother with Western Digital external drives. They don’t work well and the customer service is terrible. I purchased four of these, intending to use one as a backup, one as a standard external drive, and the other two as needed. I had trouble from nearly the first day I tried to use them. I finally got the backup working by eliminating all Western Digital drivers. Then the external drive (for normal access) became unreliable. Nearly an hour on the phone with Western Digital resulted in their statement that no company anywhere makes external drives that will work with Mac encryption. So I tried their encryption and password system, even though every reference I could find said that it is so poorly implemented that it can be defeated by a simple hacker. Now my external drive works most of the time but the backup won’t work at all, since it conflicts with the Western Digital driver required to use the external drive. And since I’ve been fighting with them for over 30 days–which is their warranty–I’m out of luck. I now have four lightweight boat anchors.

This concerns me as well since I recently replaced an internal drive with one made by Western Digital. No problems yet, but their lack of customer service has made me extremely unlikely to buy anything from them in the future.

Hi russtms,

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I now have three WD external drives:
1st 500 GB worked well with Mac, but eventually was too small
2nd 1 TB worked well with Mac, but started to fail with Time Machine when I upgraded to OS 10.13.6, so was replaced by
3rd My Passport for Mac. Time Machine fails continuously unless I reboot. I can see from other user comments that there is no solution available from either WD or from Apple. Would you mind taking it off the market? It is rather unprofessional to give this machine a title which is misleading.
I suppose now I must look for a 4th drive - from somewhere!

To summarize what I found out through a month and a half of tech support:

  1. WD external hard drives (mine was the MyPassport) can work with Macs under specific conditions.
  2. These drives cannot support Mac’s software encryption.
  3. To use the drives with Time Machine, WD encryption and/or password access must be turned off. Time Machine will reformat the drive the way it wants.
  4. If you want to use the WD hardware encryption on any external drive you cannot use another drive for Time Machine.

I followed russtms thinking and, with some trepidation, allowed my Mac to reformat ‘My Passport for Mac’. When the drive came back up in the Devices list it was just labelled My Passport and, so far, has accepted 16 Time Machine backup cycles without a glitch. For me this supports WD hardware being OK, but their Mac-orientated software needs attention.