I purchased a WD My Passport Studio 2.0 & My Passport 3.0 to use as external drives for back-up with Time Machine. However, when I start the back-up process, both drives eject from both my Macs early in to the process with zero explanation. It happens on my MacBook (10.7.5) & my brand new iMac (10.8.2). It also happens when I try and do a small back-up using Carbon Copy Cloner. So have tried reformatting them with disk utility (on both Macs) . No help. I have tried different cables. Nothing. There seems to be countless examples of this issue on the Apple forums, but no single solution. So I am now stuck with 2 drives that don’t do what they are supposed to. My La Cie drive still work just fine (and it is 5 years old)!
i just purchased the “My Book Studio 2TB” for Mac, two days ago, and I have the same problems as well. It will eject out of nowhere, even while I’m working inside the drive. I called WD this morning and they told me to download the firmware link in their Support section, but it didn’t fix it. Nothing is wrong with my USB ports, no issues with my computer.
I am bummed, because it looks like it would be a really nice external hard drive and I got it at a really good price. But because of this issue, apparently a lot more common as I keep reading other peoples same situation, maybe that’s why it was on sale…
Not sure if there is a solution here. I am going to try and call WD tomorrow and see what they say. If nothing, I am going to pack it up and try and return it where I bought it.
Possible solution…
After a phone conversation with WD this morning, the conclusion was that the device was “was encountering possible faultiness”. So, I returned the My Book Studio and exchanged for another one. So far, I have not experienced any self-ejection issues. I am going to be using it a lot just to make sure it is properly working, but for now no problems. Could be that it was truly “faulty” and needed to be returned.
This time, however, I did not install the WD Smart Ware that comes with it. I had read in another forum somewhere that uninstalling the smartware helped in some people’s situation. I am hesitant to install it because my thinking, true or not, is that maybe the Smart Ware is the reason for the ejecting problems of the hard drive.
I would suggest maybe uninstalling the smartware and see if that helps. If not, maybe try and return the device if you can.
Hope it works out for you, hope this is helpful.
