I’ve bought WD Elements desktop 4TB. It needs 2 minutes to be visible as an icon on the Windows 7 (64 bit) computer (USB2.0). Is it normal?
I have also an old WD MyBook that needs only 20 seconds to be operational, so I was surprised with such a bad performance of the WD Elements.
I tried to connect it to another computer with Windows 7 (32 bit) but got the same result.
Also, it doesn’t matter if the HDD is powered off, or on, before the USB plug is inserted.
Does anybody have the same HDD model?
For USB2.0 ? … probably, (USB2.0 is Soooo Sloooow doing anything)
I have a WD Elements Desktop 4TB and Windows 7 (64 bit) and the drive connected via USB3.0 and it takes no longer than 20 seconds to appear … Also, the drive is nearly full with only a few hundred gig free.
I’m using a older desktop PC which only had USB2.0 … so i bought a PCI Express USB3.0 card and never use USB2.0 ever again.
Joey Smyth, thank you for the answer. I 'll try with USB 3.0. By the way, USB 2.0 is probably slow for big data transfer but for just registering purposes even USB1.0 should be fast enough.
I tried it on my friend’s machine with USB 3.0 and Windows 10. It takes less than 10 seconds for WD Elements to show up (clean HDD, without data on it). Then i tried USB 2.0 port on the very same machine. It takes a little more than 10 seconds for it to show up.
Maybe the problem is with WD Elements and Windows 7 USB 2.0 drivers compatibility. It is to be investigated.
Eventually I send WD Elements to the service center. It came back and after that it works fine and needs only about 10 seconds to be visible on the screen (USB 2.0 Windows 7). They did something with WD Elements firmware, what exactly, I don’t know, but I suppose they only reset it to factory settings.
Months have passed and one day I need to restore my computer, by using a backup image. This backup image, you guess, was stored on my WD Elements. After I connected HDD to the computer (probably using drivers loaded by Repair disc CD), I realized that WD Elements again needs almost 2 minutes to be visible. Obviously something happened to the software/firmware inside WD Elements, after it was connected to the computer, in this unusual situation. I thought that it is impossible that something like this could happened, but it could. As I can remember, similar situation was happened even a year ago when i noticed the problem first time, but then I didn’t see mutual connection.
Unfortunately there is no ‘factory reset pin’ to press and recover from this situation.
