WD My Book 6 TB issues

Anyone else been having this issue with Mac / Big Sur and WD My Book? I’m experiencing frequent disconnects and unmounting of my 1 month old WD MyBook 6TB WDBBGB0060HBK. The drive for some reason powers down on it’s own and won’t come back on unless I unplug the power cable and plug it back in. I can see folders and directories, but when I click a file nothing happens until I unplug the drive and re-power it. The disconnection is random and happens often – even with all power saving and disk sleep settings on my Mac disabled. All other drives – external, SSD, etc – on my 2 year old Mac running Big Sur work perfectly. Any help, ideas, suggestions appreciated!

That happens with windows as well as with macbooks

Check to be sure the AC adapter is connected and its possible corrosion exists on it. So wipe the power plug with an eraser before plugging it back in.

I’ll try that, but I made sure the power adapter and connector into the drive were fine and firmly in place. It’s also barely 2 months old.

Anyway, I will give the eraser trick a try. I’m also re-formatting the drive today once I copy all the data out of it. My gut tells me the hard drive itself is fine, the problem is with the internal circuits, controller or enclosure. Thanks for your suggestion.

I do not recommend using a USB drive for primary storage, a NAS is a safer option

This faulty 6 TB My Book is my archive/backup drive – I also have a Synology NAS and a number of Thunderbolt SSD drives. Still want this drive to work properly given I just bought it :frowning:

Anyway, I’m reformatting it right now and testing it over the next few days. If this continues though it’s going back to WD!

some of the disks here came from a USB box that was dodgy.

copying the files from that to a 2.5" disk seems to be the safest hard disk are not archival

use a blu ray for archival

Follow up – I re-formatted the hard drive and have been issue free for the past few days.

So it’s not the USB cable or power supply.

It’s also weird as the drive doesn’t get used much and hasn’t had a lot or read/writes on it yet.

Hope the 6TB drive itself isn’t a lemon, I’ll keep a close eye on it over the next few weeks, but wiping the drive and formatting it again with Mac Disk Utility did the trick. So anyone having this issue might give this a try and see if it helps.

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Same issue, Tried re-formatting multiple times. Started on a router based server and NTFS (too slow). Moved to USB connection directly off the iMac. Went to Apple’s formatting to improve journalling. Really started into issues when tried APFS(cs) on three partitions of 2TB. One is a TimeMachine. After a day or less, TM stops and soon after, I lose the image of the other partitions. Ejecting the drives sometimes works after a re-mount. At times, it has to be forced or just powered down. Tried again with three 2TB HFS+j partitions. The TM automatically converted to APFScs. Still the issues continue. Running a 3mo old iMac with OS11.2.2.

Yeah, the re-formatting didn’t work. After awhile same thing happens – the file directory gets corrupted/files don’t launch when the drive comes off sleep mode.

I have solved it with a sort of hack which might help – I downloaded the Amphetamine app from the Apple store and have it set to run on “log in” indefinitely with the “drive alive” feature enabled (just on my WD My Book drive). This keeps my Mac from sleeping and the drive from spinning down so I don’t get this directory corruption/file not available error which only happens the WD drive goes to sleep and is then woken. BTW, I also enabled the option to leave the iMac display alone and not put it to sleep, which works well and at least saves me some power.

It’s a pain though and I’m going to return the drive later in the month.

Another try… Called for an RMA…