After exactly 2 months and 5 days of very light usage my hub **bleep** it’s pants.
It turned itself off and now continues to do so after 5 seconds of being turned on. Everytime without fail.
Returning it this afternoon.
This is a button issue. If you do a little searching, you should be able to run into a few threads talking about it, and what they did to get around it. Unfortunately, we’re still looking into what’s causing it.
I did a little searching and found the thread you’re reffering to. ( http://community.wdc.com/t5/General-Discussions/Help-Hub-powers-up-WD-light-flashes-then-powers-itself-off)..) One suggested solution is opening up the unit and fiddling with the power button pcb and connector. I’m not about to waste my time chasing dry solder joints or cheap chinese capacitors that perhaps failed. This voids the warranty so why would I do that? I returned the unit and got a replacement. Sure I lost all my media but I had it backed up somewhere else. If the unit starts to exhibit the same symptoms I will simply return it and get anther one and will continue to do so untill the warranty period is over and then get my money back. At the current rate of failure this equates to about 10 units before the warranty expires. If everyone who’s unit failed did that, perhaps WD would step up its quality control.
To the WD engineers:
The unit has been working fine for 2 months. I never use the power button on the unit itself. I use the remote to bring the unit out of standby mode. The first time the unit turned off was in the middle of playing a movie. My initial thought was that a badly encoded video (and poorly wirtten firmware that did not deal with this gracefully) cause the problem. This was not the case. The second time the unit turned off about 20 minutes later decoding a completly different file which had no issues being played several times in the past. The time between when I turned the unit on to when it turned itself off since then has continually decreased over 3 days to the point where the units turns itself off as soon as the hard disk spins up. To me this suggests perhaps a cheap debouncing capcitor failing on the button output or maybe a dry solder joint somewhere. Give me the circuit diagram and the next time the unit fails I’ll have a look. We both know that’s not gonna happen so in the mean time I’ll just keep chewing through the units.
