I have about 16 or more WD Passport drives, purchased over the last 5 years. 4 of them, 4TB each, continuously plugged in for at least 3 years, have all worked fine on USB3.0 on my entertainment PC (#1) until a week ago, and suddenly now they only work on USB2.0. I plug them into a USB3.0 connection now, and the PC#1 (an HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF with i7 3.4 Ghz & 20GB RAM) asks if I want to format the drive. Not a viable answer.
The same drive, plugged into an identical (PC#2) HP Compaq Elite 8300 SFF with i7 3.4 Ghz and 24GB RAM, has no problems and is recognized and available on USB3.0. In the last week, I upgraded this PC to Windows 10, and I had never had any issues with external drives before I performed the upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. There are no issues now with the WD My Passport drives on Win10. So far.
I suspect a driver issue, but nothing I have tried on PC#1 has worked. Renaming the drives makes no difference. The only MS Updates in the last year has been Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool x64 - latest is v5.100 (KB890830) on 4/14/2022. The timing of it does not work to be the cause, I think. MS doesn’t ‘support’ Win7 for the last 2+ years so no updates have been installed except for the Malicious Software Removal Tool x64 updates. No driver update software has made any difference so far.
Anyone have any experience with this issue?
The 4 drives that are no longer recognized by USB3.0 on PC1
