I bought a WD My Book 3.0 2TB external HDD through Amazon and had a friend bring it over for me to India a couple of months ago. Last Saturday the female USB socket came clean off its mounting on the PCB inside the drive and came out attached with the cable.
Though the drive was registered as ‘Out of Region’ with WD, I was very happy with their effort to solve the problem by sending me details to register the drive in India and their latest has been a mail which I hope will lead to the replacement of the PCB with a properly mounted female USB socket.
Considering the massive volume of the drive and some confidential content, it would be a costly and a time consuming task to back up such a lot of data or send the whole drive (after formatting) for replacement to WD.
I would strongly urge WD to improve the design and manufacturing robustness of this particular part, such that it can give many years of trouble free service. Plugging and unplugging cables should be the last thing a consumer should be afraid of and what happens when we are out of any warranty?
The right and ethical thing to do would be for WD to completely redesign this parts mounting process to give alife-long service and ship these replacement PSBs to all My Book 3.0 customers. Much like the parts recall they have in the automotive industry.
That is the only long term fix that would yield any worthwhile solution to this (what seems from the forum) not a rare problem.
I only hope WD takes the required action and keep us as satisfied customers.
Aarmin Banaji