i am hoping someone can help with this , i bought a passport 1 Tb drive, it worked well while i was putting my files onto the drive. now it is a little less than half filled and will no longer take on new data or let me transfer off data to my laptop or any other computer i own. occasionally i can transfer 1 movie off (750mb) so i can put into other storage drives and re-format the 1Tb, this was my plan as i have just bought 2 x 500 Gb drives, now i see from the forums that the passport is not the most reliable. i do not run the smartware backup system. i have just installed SW to run the drive tests. the two short tests come up with “test failed” i have not run the long test yet. but will once i transfer the current file. at the rate i am going with trying to salvage data i will be able to re-format my drive in early 2013. any help will be much appreciated. i doubt my hardware info will be of any help but i will say all this data has come from torrent sites so it very well could be virus related. but the other drives (also passports) i have used to store these files seem unaffected…
Dude, what you are asking is impossible to predict. The fact that someone mention the drive is not reliable is a matter of perception.
I have a My Book Essential 2.0 which according to the reviews is one of the worst external drive and I haven’t encounter any issue yet.
If the information is so important to you, the correct process is to have two backups, one using the hard drive and another in another storage device. Keep in mind that backup means your information is copy on two different places, otherwise is not backup.
i realise the correct procedure for important data is to have a thousand back-ups mate, this is what ive been told by everyone but how can i trust an external hard drive that does not move from my desk, has not been dropped and lives a relatively safe life on a flat surface and still manages to fail ? could it be it was dropped on the loading dock?.
you however conveniently overlooked my problem, i had no problem putting 500 GB onto the disk, now i have issues both writing data to the disk and writing data off the disk. do you have any constructive ideas? in the two weeks or so since i have posted the original post i have managed to get 25GB of data off the disk. i cannot use my computer during these times as trying to open something like internet explorer causes the projected time to extend from 3 hours to 12 hours.
I don’t have a solution but personally I don’t like USB powered drives. A lot of PC makers use barely adequet power supplies and these drives are extremely sensitive. So it can lead to problems.
thank you joe_s . that leads me back to a question i asked at the local computer shop about aquiring a y shaped usb connector to essentially run double power to the drive, are you saying these drives will " not like" too much power or too little power. my desktop pc is a cranker running CAD program and such with 750w power supply , i may have plugged into this at some time before my transfer issues started. could this pc have zapped too much power in to the hdd?
the local computer shop by the way told me my laptop should be able to power up an hdd no worries therefore making my hunt for y shaped usb connector fruitless.
again thank you for your input, i may have to try to trade my usb powered drive in for a wall plug model.
To much power isn’t usually the problem, I’d try the Y shaped cable. WD makes one called Power Booster cable. Give them a call and they might send you one. Also make sure your cable is not longer than the 18" one supplied that can cause voltage drop and problems.
the other possibility would be if the drive really is bad, with maybe too many bad sectors. I would download wd’s diagnostic utility and run both the quick and extended tests. if the drive is good, I would then repartition and format the drive. you could also have a bad partition or some corruption on the drive.
