I just bought a new WD My Book 4TB as a backup to another I purchased about a year ago. The drive is powered up, recognized by the computer, etc., but the weird thing is the white LED light in the front has been continuously flashing since hooking it up. Even when I’m not browsing to it or interacting with the files on it, the LED won’t stop flashing. My original My Book doesn’t show this behavior; only the new one is.
Is this something to be concerned about? Has anyone else run into this? Thanks!
Hi there, the only time that I’ve seen this behavior is by the computer trying to access the drive either the antivirus software or some other OS process. If you try to safely remove the drive, does it allow it?
Thank you for your reply. I am using Carbon Clone Copy to back up to this drive (from one external to another), but it only backs up once a day. It shouldn’t be accessing the drive continuously, and in fact the flashing persists even when I disable the CCC Agent. I don’t know of any other processes that could be accessing the drive this much. I’ve got two other externals connected to my iMac (including a duplicate My Book 4TB), and neither exhibits the issue.
The drive is perfectly accessible, and can be removed safely with no issues. Each time the computer is rebooted (or the drive is re-added), the issue begins again.
I had this issue earlier today, it would blink like it was in use but worked normally. I managed to fix it by doing an Error check in Windows. Windows found and repaired some errors and the blinking went back to normal(only when in use). I think I lost power during a file transfer causing the drive to be flagged as dirty or something similar and this was the drives error flash.
If you are on a mac go to Applications - Utilities - Disk Utility click on the drive name and run first aid, as said above in the windows thread, this will repair any broken links or permissions or whatever.
When this happened to me a while a go I ran it on the top name of the drive, WD whatever it is and on the name that I gave the drive & it stopped flashing… Hope this helps
Just in case some one has this issue I figured I write down the more likely solution to this problem.
Its Spotlight that most likely is indexing your harddrive, this can occur if the disc lost power or or was disconnected improper, ofc other reasons may apply.
So open systems folder, go to spotlight, second tab opens up a box where you add discs/folders spotlight should not index, simply hit + sign and add your external harddrive and enter.
You should se that the activity/blinking will end right away, problem solved.
