WD 3.0 USB 1 TB External HD disconnects

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

My WD HD shows for 5-10 secs the shuts down and gives me the “safely remove hardware” message and ejects.  This happened first while I was transferring files to my WD 1 TB HD. I filled it up and was deleting files to make room and all of a sudden it ejects itself and gives me this message. Can someone please help. I don’t want to lose all this info and I really don’t want to pay anything to fix this. I have a Macbook Pro that I bought in ’10 and the HD is only 3 weeks out of the box.

These are things I have tired already:

-switched USB cable out

-under dish utility trying to do disk repair.  (will not stay connected long enough to complete)

-down loaded testdisk(will not stay connected long enough to complete)

-tried to use terminal in recover mode to delete corrupt files(will not stay connected long enough to complete)

Any other ideas, please help!!!

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MAC-WD wrote:

 I filled it up and was deleting files to make room and all of a sudden it ejects itself and gives me this message.

First mistake, if you didn’t want to lose those files then why did you move them over from your computer and leave no backup?  A backup means by definition to keep the same files on at least 2 completely different places in case one is to fail, you should never trust your “important data” (if it is actually important) to a single drive, no matter who makes it. it can fail just 20 seconds after yo erase the files from the source and make data unrecoverable.

Try a different USB cable (A micro USB 2.0 cable from most phones will work) and make sure you’re not using a power strip since it can also affect the drive. Other than that there’s no much left to do if the drive as a connection problem.

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I recently purchased a WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 2.0/3.0 drive and experienced similar problems: The drive worked fine for a few minutes, and then would invariably eject itself, even in the middle of Finder copy or Time Machine backup operation. (I have a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard.) Thinking the drive was defective, I returned it for a replacement … and had exactly the same problem. An external drive that can’t copy or backup is worthless.

Fortunately, I had access to several different WD external USB drives and several different Macs. Tring different combinations, I concluded that the problem occurs only when both of the following are true:

  1. The WD external USB drive has a -01 model number.
  2. The current (recent?) version of WD SmartWare is installed.

In particular, I have experienced the problem with the just the following model (two different drives);

  • WDBACX0010BBL -01 (WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 2.0/3.0 Blue)

But all of the following models work fine:

  • WDBACY5000ABL -00 (WD My Passport Essential 500GB USB 2.0/3.0 Blue) 
  • WDBACY5000ARD -00 (WD My Passport Essential 500GB USB 2.0/3.0 Red)
  • WDBAAA6400ASL (WD My Passport Essential 640GB USB 2.0 Silver)
  • WDBABM7500ASL-00 (WD My Passport Essential SE  750GB USB 2.0 Silver)
  • WDBACX0010BBK-00 (WD My Passport Essential SE 1TB USB 2.0/3.0 Black)

Note that -00 and -01 drives appear to have totally different series of firmware updates. The -00 drives have firmware versions such as 1.012 through 1.016 (the most recent as of a few weeks ago). In contrast, the -01 drives have firmware versions such as 1.003 (again, the most recent as of a few weeks ago).

And the problem occurs when the current version of WD SmartWare is installed:

  • WD SmartWare Version 1.3.3.8

But the problem does NOT occur when earlier versions are installed:

WD SmartWare Version 1.3.2.5 — but note that this earlier version of WD SmartWare does not appear to recognize the newer (?) -01 drives, so it is probably as if WD SmartWare isn’t installed for these drives.

For all my tests, I have been using various iMacs, MacBooks and MacBook Pros, all running the current version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8).

Of course, the work around is to uninstall WD SmartWare, and the problem does appear to go away.

This workaround would be acceptabe except that:

  1. You can’t run S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics without WD SmartWare.
  2. You lose the convenient “Unmount Volume” menu bar command.

Given the larger number of different combinations I tried, I conclude that the problem is NOT with a cable or with a particular drive but rather is a systematic problem involving a line of (newer?) drives WD SmartWare (for Mac, as I have not done any tests on PCs). Whether responsibility lies with the drive hardware, the firmware, WD SmartWare or some incopatibility with Mac OS X I do not know.

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OregonRob wrote:

This workaround would be acceptabe except that:

 

  1. You can’t run S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics without WD SmartWare.

I don’t know about you but I get the SMART status on Windows using HD Tune, and no Smartware…