Hi, i have recently bought myself a new WD Elements 5TB external (WDBWLG0050HBK-UESN) in the past month. I have been running it without any issues until yesterday.
I went out and put my Acer laptop (XP operating system) into sleep mode for about 6 hours. When i returned and tried to wake it up from sleep, into active mode… I pressed the power button… and nothing loaded for 10 minutes. I’ve put my laptop into sleep mode many a time, and never gave me any issues before.
My problem is now that my WD Elements 5TB External drive doesn’t go into sleep/idle mode anymore when i’m not using it. All my 16 external drives used to at the same time, but now only this one seems to be playing up and it’s frustrating the **bleep** out of me.
Does anyone know what could cause this malfunction? and how to kick-start it back to factory settings? while keeping my data (if possible). Has it got anything to do with a firmware?
I would really appreciate some help with this very frustrating situation, thanks.
Welcome to the Community.
Unlike the WD My Book or WD Passport product families, the WD Elements does not feature a controllable sleep timer. If the unit refused to go to sleep after a few months of usage then it’s likely a process did not properly close before hibernating the system.
Does this happen now as well with other computers?
How do you mean it’s likely a process did not finish/close before hibernating? - I basically put the laptop to sleep and i saw all the hard drives went into standby (on and off white light/blinking). When I powered the machine up again, the hard drives came on, but it took forever to enter the log in screen so I pressed the power button on and off a few times over the course of a few minutes… still nothing. so when the machine was off, I disconnected both USB hubs from the USB ports and that kicked started the machine to enter the log in screen. From there instead of entering my desktop, I turned off the laptop and restarted it, and that’s where the problem started. I’ve uninstalled all the drivers for the hard drives and reinstalled them…
I haven’t tried it yet on other laptops…
Worst comes to worst, would I have to invest in buying a new WD Elements 5TB External?
The device should be under warranty for a free replacement from Western Digital if it was purchased from an authorized reseller less than 1 year from the date of purchase.
Problem is, I got 5TB of data on there and I haven’t got enough space to put it anywhere else on any other drives. I bought it directly from Western Digital UK.
I’ve also scanned all of my external hard drives with HDDScan? and all seem to in the green and working fine. I stupidly set the ‘Idle timer’ to disable, and then 600 seconds etc. but nothing changed it. That was before I uninstalled all the drivers and then reinstalled them. Normally that should rectify an issue, right?
Maybe you should try contacting WD’s Technical Support about this. You can do so either by phone or email.
To Contact WD for Technical Support
http://support.wdc.com/contact/index.asp?lang=en
Support by Country
http://support.wdc.com/country/index.asp
Just sent an email to them, so hopefully I will get some help with this. Thank you for your time Trancer.
