Why does My Passport keeps spinning even after it is unmounted?

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hello,

On October 26th, I have purchased a WD My Passport 2TB USB 3.0 drive. I use it with the Mac, so I reformatted it for OS X, no big deal. I have installed the WD Drive Utilities app, and ran all tests on the drive. The ‘Complete Drive Test’ took 7 hours - phew!!! - but all tests have passed.

Today, October 27th, I noticed that for some reason, the drive never stops spinning, even after I unmount it.

Here are the steps:

  1. Connect the drive and wait until it shows up on the Finder. You can hear the drive spinning and feel it a little when you place your hand over it.
  2. Spotlight indexing is disabled for the drive, so no indexing is taking place.
  3. Unmount the drive.
  4. The drive is unmounted, the icon disappears from the Finder and the drive stops spinning.
  5. After 5 seconds (!!!) the drive starts spinning again - even though it is not mounted - and the back LED flashes 4 times every 8 seconds. Then the drive is just keeps spinning and never stops.

I have 2 other older WD portable drives (WD Elements 1TB and 2TB). When I unmount them, they spin down and won’t start spinning.

I have tried other USB ports on the Mac and the drive behaves the same way regardless which port it is attached to.

Since all tests are passed, why is the drive keeps spinning and the light flashing even if it’s unmounted? (but other drives don’t behave like this)

Thanks.

PS: I am not using any backup software with any of my drives. Time Machine is off.

Model: WDBYFT0020BBK-WESN
OS X 10.11.6 - El Crapitan

2

It seems the issue has been solved. I had to uninstall the WD Drive Utilities app. For some reason the app did not let the drive spin off.

Makes me wonder if anyone over at WD heard of “TESTING”…?

3

It is happening the same to me but I uninstalled the WD app and it did not change anything.

4

I did uninstall WD app to solve my problem too. I believe there is a file that run in the background that keeps the drive spinning “WD helper or WD assistant”

The only to solve is to make sure none of the WD app running in the background. Use your Activity monitor to check.