A few months ago, I wrote this review of the WD My Book Pro Edition II drive. I hereby rescind anything positive I said about it. I am at the end of my patience with this drive, and Western Digital’s technical support has failed me. My three BIG problems with the drive are as follows:
- It crashes my Mac (iMac G5 running Tiger). My iMac does great otherwise, and I have plenty of other external drives. When I connect the drive to the Mac, it will crash it either within minutes or within an hour or so. It’ll crash it so badly that I’ll need to do a hard reset.
- It’s falsely advertised. It’s supposed to be a three-interface drive, and it isn’t. It DOES NOT work through Firewire 400 on the Mac. The computer just won’t see it, even if I connect the drive through USB first, initialize/reformat it through the Disk Utility, then reconnect it through Firewire. It seems that other Apple users are experiencing the same problems, even with Firewire 800 connections, as evidenced by their posts in the Apple forums.
- The drive will overheat, its fan will go into overdrive, making a horrible noise, and it will shut down randomly, even during file transfers.
This drive is a failure. It’s marketed as a Pro drive to Mac users, but it can’t be used on the Mac. While it’ll work on the PC, one can only use it there in RAID 1 or RAID 0 when it’s formatted with FAT32 NTFS. If you want format it in FAT32 and RAID 1, so it’s usable on both PCs and Macs, you cannot do that with WD’s RAID Manager software. Of course, when it’s formatted in FAT32, keep in mind that files larger than 4 GB can’t go on the drive.
For the past few months, I’ve been going back and forth with Western Digital support. I’m now on my third replacement drive, which I’m shipping back today. It has the same problems outlined above, just like the other two drives.
What’s more, I’ve been getting crappy, used drives in replacement from Western Digital. They’re scratched, scuffed, and generally in bad shape when they get to me. I kept my original drive in pristine condition, and I’ve had to put up with progressively worse drives from them, aesthetically speaking. I refuse to keep doing this.
My desk has been a wiring mess since I made the horrible mistake of buying this really expensive paper weight. I’ve had to keep shuffling my data on and off the drive, and transfer it between my other drives to keep it alive. This drive, which was supposed to promote data safety and reliability through its RAID 1 capability, has made me feel extremely unsafe about my data.
I recorded a video last night to show you what I’m going through. I’m at the end of my patience with this product and with Western Digital, who seem bent on sticking their customers with this dud and refuse to do the proper thing and acknowledge they’ve messed up.
At this point, I am interested in any of these three options:
- A refund from Western Digital for the full purchase price of the drive; it’s unusable, and I don’t want to be stuck with it.
- A replacement drive in pristine condition that will unconditionally work as advertised, through Firewire 400, 800 and USB, will not overheat and will not crash my Mac. I refuse to do the whole RMA thing again, unless I am 100% guaranteed to receive such a drive. (Updated 7/3/08: I got a replacement drive in pristine condition (as requested). It’s a WD Studio Edition II drive, and I’ve been using it since 4/16/08 without any issues. I plan to write a review for it shortly.)
- Joining a class action lawsuit that will hopefully get Western Digital to acknowledge this product has been falsely advertised, and has serious manufacturing defects that prevent it from working properly. I’d like them to issue either refunds, or properly working drives in new, unused condition to all of the customers affected by these problems.
Updated 2/6/08: On 12/18/07, I was contacted by a PR executive from WD. Apparently someone had made him aware of my post and my findings. He was very courteous and offered to put me in touch with WD’s advanced tech support, in the hope that my problems could be worked through. I accepted, and was shortly contacted by WD’s head of tech support, who then put me in touch with one of their technicians. I worked with the technician and gave him all of the information that he needed, and that was all I’ve heard from them since December.
In mid-January, I emailed both the PR executive and the head of tech support, asking for updates. Had they forgotten about me? Apparently not, I was told by the PR exec. They were still working on a fix and had set a deadline of 1/31/08 to have it available for me to try. January 31st came and went, and I heard nothing from them. I contacted the PR exec again yesterday, and haven’t heard anything since. Not sure what’s going on at this point, and if a firmware fix for my problems will ever be made available.
I’ll keep this post updated as things develop — if they will any further…
For good measure, here are some photos of the scratches and scuffs on the last replacement drive I received. This was a drive I was supposed to accept in exchange for my original drive, which I kept in pristine condition. If you want to talk about a complete lack of manners on Western Digital’s part, and an action that makes one wonder if they’ve ever heard of customer service, you can start right here.
DO NOT BUY this drive, unless you want to go through what I’m going through right now.
Updated 7/3/08: On 4/16/08, I received a replacement drive from Western Digital. It’s a 2TB Studio Edition II drive, which works in USB, Firewire 400/800 and eSATA modes. I’ve been using it since in RAID 0, and it’s been working great. To see how I use it, read this recent post of mine, where I talk about the hardware I use on a daily basis. I also plan to write a detailed review of the drive shortly.
I guess the lesson is that the My Book Pro line had serious faults, and WD got things right with the My Book Studio line. So, if you’re in the market for a drive, DO NOT get a My Book Pro. But DO get a My Book Studio II drive. They work alright.
I too, have had weird things going on with the same drive! Running MacPro with Leopard. I would also love to join a class action suit!
Michael Jonas
I’ve been meaning to contact you about your drive after I read a story via BoingBoing stating that the WD software is so DRM-laden that it refuses to allow sharing of music or video over a home network. Of course, that could just be on the PC end, so I was wondering what your experience might be.
I’ve had the WD Pro drive for two months now. It is connected to an iMac (aluminum) running Leopard. All I use it for is backup. I use “DataBackup” for Leopard and it runs flawlessly every night. It has saved my rear end more than once. I don’t do RAID and so I can’t comment. Mine is FW 800. I don’t use WD software at all. Just reformatted the drive when it arrived using Leopard’s Disk Utility and away I go. It keeps a 250 GB media library backed up without issue, while backing up the other 100 GB of program files and OS nightly.
I can’t offer you any suggestions; only a contrary experience. Don’t get me started on Maxtor, however. LaCie works fine but is slow, slow, slow.
@mrfearless47, what you refer to as the WD Pro drive is actually the first edition Pro. I can’t speak about that, since I don’t own one. It’s easy to mistake the two models by their name. I’m talking about the Pro Edition II, which is an entirely different beast. It uses RAID whether you like it or not. You can choose RAID 0 (also known as striping) or RAID 1 (also known as mirroring). You’re also using Leopard, not Tiger, so the experience can’t be compared there, either.
@Julie, the drive you refer to is the WD World Edition II, which I reviewed separately. I recently updated that review regarding the foolish DRM restrictions.
Wow! For WD’s sake I was hoping I was the only one having problems with this drive! Mine wouldn’t mount with FW 400, but I got over it. What I don’t get over so easily is that the drive will randomly unmount itself, even right in the middle of an iBackup operation or a file copy. Great, it copies for an hour, dies randomly in the middle, so I have to start over at the beginning! And do I ever feel safe about my backups? Nope!
The other thing I discovered… my Mac kept not recognizing blank DVD’s, would say it couldn’t use them. The culprit? The WD driver that isn’t really needed anyways! Once that gets deleted, burning CD’s worked again.
–Dan Dawson
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And here I was thinking that it was my office being too warm…. I purchased this drive about 6 months ago and have had the same exact problems and considered doing an RMA, but alas, that appears to be a worthless trip.
I unfortunately paid ~ $500 for mine, and am stuck with a mostly usable harddrive that randomly crashes, and that does not serve my home theater pc very well. I’ve always had good luck from WD in the past, so this is somewhat of a let down.
And to think that they have the nerve to send you “used” replacements is ridiculous.
I am interested in joining a class action lawsuit as well.
Thank you for the reporting Raoul
Hi!
I had 2 external drives both WD. A 250 mybook pro firewire 800 and 120GB passport. I used the 250GB to store my projects and media, and the passport for take my work on the way with my Macbooks. I am running 4 computers with Apple OS X Leopard. I have other hard drives with no problem whatsoever, I am a computer games development student so I do a fair use of my system day to day.
Well the thing is that about two weeks ago my passport drive passed away, no warning or noises, just stopped working. One backup off. Within one week my other WD hard drive goes off as well. No warnings, no strange noises, no disks errors, no lights, no power, just switched off and never came back to life.
So here I am, I don’t know what to do really, I have arranged with WD an RMA but I am about to lose all my data. Any advice before I send my broken HDs to WD?
I think we should unite all and tell WD to get us back out data, I am on for the lawsuit, this seems too much of a coincidence…
Any help would be very welcome!!!
Jose, you may want to look at data recovery services. Depending on how precious your data is, paying for someone to get it off the drives may be worth it. I can’t speculate why both of them died within such a short period of each other. I can only say that since they’re very different drives (not only different models, but different drive sizes) it was likely a very unfortunate coincidence.
The lawsuit I referred to in the video was specifically for the WD My Book Pro Edition II drive. And I wasn’t interested in starting one, but joining one. I should make it clear I’m not a litigious person and do not believe that lawsuits are the answer for problems like this. But I am keeping that option open as an absolute last resort.
For now, I’m waiting for Western Digital to get back to me with their findings. They contacted me after I wrote this post, and are looking into the problem. I heard back from them tonight, and they’ve given me a date of 1/31 for a possible fix. We’ll see what happens. I’ll update this post as I hear more from them.
I’ve been using the 250 GB My Book Essential Edition and for the most part it works fine.
Somedays it seems haunted if you will and will randomly turn on and off, repeatedly in a matter of minutes.
The button on the front also has no indicator of when you successfully press it for the purpose it was designed for.
I would be interested in receiving a refund as it is NOT reliable in any sense and it’s a roll of the dice as to wether or not ill be able to pull my information off of it.
Hey, some news from WD.
First of all I didn’t send my drive back because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to lost my data. I received a “used” unit from WD due to my RMA claim. They send me exactly the same model but the drive was all scratched and scuffed, as Raoul pointed out their RMA’s drives are not as well look after as some of ours. I only wanted this drive for its FW800 interface so I never bother to even try the other interfaces before, but this time I tried all of them. Well the results were a little bit worrying…
The USB connection was fine, it worked. The FW400 was not recognise at any moment. The FW800 worked for a few minutes and then crashed to not come back again. In a matter of minutes I was again without drive. This completely destroys your trust in a device which solely means (at least for me) is to provide security.
I emailed WD like five times but they never answered back. Then I got to talk by phone with someone from their customer service and they agreed to send me a brand new replace. The guy I talked to was very polite and helpful. I told him what was going on (I had two broken drives and they wanted to charge me $300 for a piece of rubbish with my data inside) and he offered me to keep the original drive with no charge.
Now they seem to have lost both drives that I sent back to them, which actually happened after the drives reached the collection point because I have an email from them saying that they had the drives at some point. I am still waiting for both replacements, a passport 120GB and a MyBook Pro Edition II 250GB but I don’t care for this drives or WD ever again.
I have lost all my data in repeated occasions , once I was stolen, now this FAULTY drives, I am becoming a little bit obsessed with backing up my data. At the moment I am using LaCie 500GB USB drives to backup data but I only have them for a few months so I don’t know how reliable they are. I need to buy two professional drives with FW800 interface, can anyone give some advice on which drives will meet my requirements…?
By the way, I have two drives for selling…anyone interested??
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I would just like to echo the negative sentiments stated here. The MyBook Pro II Dual Drive paperweight. What a shoddy product. I’m breathing deep to dispel my anger. Exact same problems, exact same complaints (how did I find this site in the first place?) DON’T BUY THIS DRIVE!
Same issues here — constant overheating and shut offs — can’t even backup my data which makes it a paper weight for me too…..argh!!!
Starting to feel pissed.
Problems with the Western Digital Mybook Pro II, too. I wrote the german support but they didn’t feel responsible for me and so I got no answer until today.
I think the expression paper weight fits the use of the hdd best.
My MyBook all of a sudden decided to corrup all data on the file. Instead of filenames and folders it now shows
=?=(?”¤#%
%#¤&”#/&
&¤&%¤/&%(/
As I noticed I tried to pull data of the disk but after each file copied of the disk the more data became corrupted.
Apperantly it “happens” with WD myBook.
I will not buy anything from WD anytime soon.
“While it’ll work on the PC, one can only use it there when it’s formatted with FAT32…”
Where did you hear this? I own a My Book Pro Edition II and formatted it to NTFS with files still on it. I am running Windows XP on a 3-4 year old system. I’ve never owned a Mac in my life.
David, my phrasing was confusing and incorrect. Just fixed it. What I meant to say is that the drive can’t be formatted in FAT32 if you need RAID 1. It can only be formatted in NTFS for either RAID 1 or 0 if you’re using the Windows version of the WD RAID Manager software. Sorry about that. Thankfully, I’ve been saying it right in my original review of the drive.
I just bought and tested a WD MyBook World Edition II.
My experiences so far:
1) Finding out it doesn’t have a USB to computer interface and doesn’t support FTP.
Note to self: Salesmen lie, though packaging is misleading.
2) Must guess the default IP, username & login. (documentation? None besides install Mio, here are some screenshots.)
Anwers: has no DHCP fallback afaik, user=admin, pasw=123456 (7?)
3) Transferrate is no more than 4MB per second while the packaging boasts “GIGABIT INTERFACE” as a prime feature.
I sure hope that the device fails before i put anything important on it..
Hi,
problem with “My book Pro” 500gb on Firewire 800. Running on Leopard. Imac Intel 34″
The drive fails to be seen by the iMac.
I went out and purchased another My Book personal edition running on Firewire 400 thinking the 3 month old was faulty ! then found this post…
going straight back to get a refund.
L
i’m from indonesia, i bought wd world edition II 1TB, and that stupid thing alway hung after 5 minutes start, transfer file so slow, damn stupid thing …
i’m too late read this post
I too made the mistake of buying a Western Digital product. I have a My Book Pro 500 GB drive that is dead.
Upon startup the drive will refuse to mount in any of the connections (USB, FW400, FW800). I had used this hard drive for about 13 months or so. Until about 2 weeks ago it started to get hiccups. I immediately transfered everything over (unfortunately to a WD My Book Pro 750GB) and managed to lose only 3 days worth of data.
Upon boot into Leopard, the drive will power up, spin up, and buzz at me systematically. BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ. 3 chirps while the drive is spinning at full speed. It will tie up the computer as the computer (macbook PRO) tries to mount it. It fails too. The drive also runs super HOT.
I’m going to run down to the computer store and pick up a cheap enclosure and remove the dead drive and see if the data is salvageable. If not that looks like I was the fool for buying a WD product. I’m also wondering if it is the controller that is bad, or if the drive is actually bad, if it’s just the controller I might go and pick up a nice Seagate ES.2 750 GB SATA drive and plunk it into the enclosure.
POS! DON’T BUY!
People,
These problems occur also with PC.
I bought MyBook 500Gb home edition and is had sudden crashes.
I switched it (by my dealer’ reccomendation) to MyBook Studio 500Gb and it was worse.
DO NOT BUY Any MyBook product.
It’s a nightmare!
looks like i’m joining the club. my WD my book pro edition II 1TB died earlier this week. after 1 year of reasonable performance (i had to muck around with the initial driver/setup for it to be detected by my iMac), the drive would start to demount itself after being on for 5 minutes. i look up wdc.com and try the latest firmware. it decides to crash during the flash upgrade and there you have it – a drive that no longer spins up – just that stupid blue inner ring that lights up. i had the drive set up in RAID1 mode – anyone know whether i could just open up the case and plug one of the drives into a regular SATA connection to another computer and copy the data off it? HELP!
Alfred, you’re in luck (relatively speaking). If you set it up in RAID 1, you should be able to just plug either one of the drives into a SATA connection and retrieve your data.
Some news I have…
I changed my config. (WD MyBook-Studio 500GB + HP Laptop + WIndows XP-SP2) as follows:
1. Control panel,System, Disk Drives – properties, policies, Optimized for perfromace.
2. Switched from Firewire to USB2.0 (it turns out that Firewire can handle only one application at a time!).
For the past 4 days this config. works just fine for me.
No disconnects of the HD.
Hope it helps.
MyBook Pro II, doesnt mount, Mac OS X.4.9, disk is recognized by System Profiler, disk utitlity (although all first aid is greyed out), disk warrior crashes on startup.. .. .. am I now an official member of the WD paperweight club?
Same story here. Had it for a little over a year, and these problems got progressively worse. Thought I was the only one. Guess I’m wrong. Both drives reported ‘faulty’ today by My Book Raid Manager. Hoping when I get an RMA, that I can use the RAID 1 Config to rebuild, but my hopes are not high. 12 years of my life may be gone. I too bought this drive thinking I was getting a Professional back-up drive for my studio. Ran in Raid 1 to ensure that, instead of combing the drives to 1 TB. This will probably be the last WD product I buy that doesn’t come OEM.
Sh*t. There goes 500gb of data maybe.
+1 for the Class Action.
P.S. – I was able to use Firewire, but I paid over $400 for this thing.
took the drive to the guru today. It’s apparently that drive B is overheating but he cant find the cause of it, but definitely a hardware malfunction somewhere. He said it was too hot to even touch. Meanwhile I had it sitting on 2 pencils so that it would get some ventelation from the bottom. That is a) preventing the drives from mounting and b) making any data uncoverable. So I’m in the paperweight club. The best I can hope for is that my guy can reformat ONE of the drives and I can have a 500 GB drive but believe me I am so angry I will never again buy a western digital product, ever, ever, ever.
I have to apologize to Raoul for saying his review was misleading. I have too, experienced problems with my drive. The one I have is the MyBook Pro II 1.5 TB set up as RAID1, giving me 750GB of storage.
The situations I have are as follow. All conditions happen the same on two different computers. One is a desktop running XP Pro with 2GB of RAM and an Athlon 3800+ on an Asus motherboard. The other is a Dell XPS laptop with a Core 2 Duo 7500, 2.4GHz and 2GB of RAM.
1. The drive works fine.
2. When I try to shut it off with its central button, WD Button Manager crashes and tells me I should not remove the drive.
3. After a while of being idle, whenever I try to look up a file on the drive, the folder structure only lets me enter third level and I get an error message saying that “Delayed writing failed” on the drive. I have to shut it down hard by pulling the power cable.
4. When I hook it back on, it goes into fan overdrive mode for about 10 minutes until it flashes the “drive ovearheating” code (both rings flashing continuously) and becomes very hot to touch.
5. I’ve tried to have the drive sitting vertically as suggested, and horizontally to allow all air vents to function but the same stuff happens.
I’m in Costa Rica and bought the drive through Amazon and had it shipped to a freight-forwarding courier service so shipping costs would be high for me should I have to return it. I think I’m still within the 30-day free Tech Support from WD. I’ll find out tomorrow and REALLY hope there is an acceptable solution.
All my data (about 600GB worth of things I cannot lose (my projects, work, etc) is in there.
I don’t know how much pressure I could put in a class action lawsuit from Costa Rica, but I’ll do whatever it takes.
my drive is d e a d .. .. .. please send flowers.
My drive is suddenly not powering up at all! (My Book Pro Edition II… I’m on a G5 w/Leopard) The vast majority of all my data is on there from the past SEVERAL YEARS! It’s a 750GB drive. I’m a little freaked out because I am not that smart w/computers… do you now how I can get my data? Help!!!
Dianne, I’m guessing yours is a single-drive unit. Work with WD support to see if you can’t get it to power up, and if you can’t, get a tech friend/contact of yours to help you get the drive out of the My Book enclosure and connect it to your computer via other means. This will allow you to retrieve your data. Then you can decide what to do with it: (1) send it to WD for repairs, (2) keep the drive and throw away the enclosure, etc.
I also just had my MyBook Pro II 1 TB suddenly stop working — finished moving almost 800 GB of video files from several other drives (finally, I thought, they would all be in one place…) on Saturday, and on Sunday the drive wouldn’t mount, no sound coming from it, etc etc etc, you’ve read it all before… I was using the FW 400, tried switching to USB. Nothing… so I walked away from it so I wouldn’t throw it against the wall.
I emailed several of the data recovery companies linked to on the WD website. Hmmm, quotes of around $2,000 to recover data from a drive that I got for around $200.
I’m going to try some of the suggestions posted here, see if I can recover anything. I’ll also try posting on Craigslist, see if there are any geeks who want to give it a shot. I’ll probably do an RMA, but only AFTER I’ve moved my data to a new drive.
By the way, I went to Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City and epinions.com and wrote scathing reviews for these drives, and included a link to this page so prospective buyers can see what they’re getting into. I suggest everyone here do the same — a lot of negative user reviews might prevent someone else from the same fate. I’d like to think it would also get WD’s attention, but from what I’m reading, I don’t think it will.
How can there NOT be a Class Action lawsuit yet against WD’s My Book. How many people have to get ripped off by this company’s negligent design??? I have two 500 GB My Book drives that will no longer work. What a waste of hard-earned money!!!! I feel like attaching both units to the bumper of my car and dragging them around town.
I’ve got a My Book Pro 500GB, which has been having issues since upgrading to Leopard, but has got even worse in the last couple of weeks. I noticed WD put updates for Home and Studio drives on their site. I asked when we could expect one for the Pro versions and was told:
“Unfortunately, we can not comment, or give information about any future or unreleased updates that may be forthcoming. If and when there is a update, it will be available on our website. There will only be an update if it is determined that the drive does not function properly without that form of update.”
How can they realise that the Home and Studio editions require an update but not the Pro version.
Sign me up for the CLASS ACTION SUIT. I too have the 1TB Pro MyBook and Western Digital has punted the ball. They will not acknowledge that their own software in the form of a firmware upgrade has rendered this raid unusable and the data on it inaccessible. They want me to pay to data recovery because their firmware ruined the disk controllers.
The 1TB Pro MyBook just all of a sudden died after a reboot of my system. Now all my data I had on there is no longer accessible and Western Digital is not providing any form of support what so ever. Sign me up as well for that Class Action Suit…..
My 1TB WD MyBook Pro Edition II drive also crashed a few days ago with ALL my precious history of 20+ years. I wish someone would take this drive and beat every person at Western Digital for a week with it.
The controller went bad, quit working. The drives are still ok. But to recover the data will cost thousands. More than 900 GB of family history on this so called backup drive.
Add me to the class action suit!! I am very serious.
The Wikipedia page for these drives have been updated to reflect this blogs valuable public warning.
Add me to the list. Just spent 3 days trying to get this thing to work.
I’m using the My Book World – NAS. Boots up OK, occasionally decides to get an IP address from my router, occasionally manage to write a file or two before it stops working.
This drive is a complete lemon you must not by one. how can WD not admit its a failure and recall all the drives.
Like many I was tempted by 1Tb of storage at low cost – what an idiot.
got a 1TB MyBook paperweight too. no firewire 400 on the PC. USB works fine, but it hangs the system when connected to firewire. interesting, as i’ve had/have many other external drives without this problem.
and the guy at Fry’s said, “Buy this one, as it gets way less returns.”
compared to what?
Hi,
Just want to throw in my words of support. I had a 250 GB MyBook that I used to use with an iBook/Tiger, recently “upgraded” to a 1 TB MyBook Pro Edition II. The 250 drive (it was the second of such, the first died inexplicably when it was still, thankfully, under warranty) started experiencing the same problems which is why I got the 1 TB drive. I formatted it to be Raid 1 with the Mac file system (NTFS? I forget..) and it worked OK for a few days. Then I got a MacBook/Leopard and when I tried transferring my data to my MacBook I couldn’t do more than approx 300MB at a time — it would just freeze after that and say that whatever file it was in the midst of copying over at the time of the freeze couldn’t be copied b/c it was “in use” by another program (nothing else was open). Then the folder those files were in would be “in use” and then it would finally crash.
I’m trying my damnedest to get my pictures off my 1 TB drive now b/c those are the only irreplaceable files on it. Then I’m going to swear off WD for the rest of my life. Any recommendations as to what to get to replace the 1 TB? My friend said Seagate is the best and LaCie ain’t bad either — any personal experiences with Seagate? (I read the few about LaCie in the earlier comments).
I would definitely join a lawsuit if one existed — I’ll keep checking back in case that becomes a reality!
i bought a wd my studio 1000 gigas. i bought with usb2, firewire (this model have both 400 and 800 and e-sata(my pourpose for use)wdhq10000
The e-sata is not the standard- it wont works on the cables i could find.
firewire depends on something that i can recognize -sometimes works sometimes not.
Ok usb works fine every time but transfer heavy videos is not for usb.
i contacted the importer that told me that is a known issue but he didnt have a solution!
i contacted wd by mail and the told me to purchase a certified e-sata cable.
and they do not sell this cable out of the USA!
So i bought something more expensive that cannot be used!!!!
aarghhhhh
I bought a 1Tb WD MyBook pro2 about a year or more ago from costco, iirc for about $400. I used it with my powerbook G4 running tiger’s latest version and highly unfortunately for me as raid0 (I wanted the 1Tb capacity and the speed). The drive worked fine and I foolishly moved my iTunes library and stored all of my movies on it without any other backup. At times the fan would kick into high speed and is very loud, similar to a hair dryer. About a month ago the drive would not mount and clicked a few times then produced an error message to contact WD support…an oxymoron as I later found out. Contacting WD has been useless and they referred me to their data recovery partner$ where I’m looking at $500-$1200 depending upon the difficulty of the recovery.
I am considering at least spending the $100 to see what data is deemed recoverable, and then to make a judgment from there and possibly spending the money this one time and learning a HUGE lesson, to never trust any drive as a backup and redundant backups; which is what I heard over and over from the dozen or so data recovery companies I called.
Also I am disappointed to hear that WD has not replaced the defective drives with new product, and have returned scuffed, scratched unpackaged drives. I was hoping that I would be able to offset some of this insulting injury by selling the replacement item, but I guess that is out. At this point I would prefer to have a refund of my original purchase price. I know WD makes good internal drives, but this MyBook series is SERIOUSLY FLAWED and MUST BE AVOIDED!
I had to come back to post this from wikipedia regarding the pro editions:
“Though the “Pro Edition MyBook” is marketed as a raid solution that can be used a backup device, very serious reliability issues occur frequently. [1][2][3]
The dreaded “click, click, click of death” is the phrase now associated with the most recent problem with these drives. It often occurs after the installation of Western Digital’s own firmware updates to these drives. Once installed, the firmware update renders the drive unmountable and useless to its owners.
To date, Western Digital has offered its affected customers one of two options:
1. Returning their drives to Western Digital and LOSING ALL DATA, or 2. Sending the drive to one of Western Digital’s “partners” who provide Data Recovery services for$2,000 or more.
These “Pro” drives can no longer be accessed because of the faulty Western Digital firmware update, but rather than providing a solution to its customers that restores functionality and access to important user data Western Digital’s policy so far is to offer a $15 coupon on new purchases of$150 and to direct their customers to pay above and beyond the high anxiety incurred by these “updates” and the time lost due to the inability to access the data. As of May 29, 2008, Western Digital has not offered a meaningful solution to its customers. [4]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_My_Book#Edition_II_My_Books
If this grounds for a class action lawsuit I don’t know what is. It can almost be construed as a scam intended to enhance the profits of the data recovery companies WD has agreements with; potential anti-trust here?
Sure wish I would have read this BEFORE I bought mine. Now I suffer very similar situations. The drive worked for a time, long enough for me to get some pictures and other files transferred on to it. Important files. Then it just disappeared! Poof! Well, of course I can see it sitting pretty on my desk but what I can’t do is see it on the network nor can I see my files or my pictures that mean so much! It won’t power down with the power button. Every now and then when I work at it, it shows up and gives me a ray of hope that I can retrieve my files but when I access the drive, it gets pissy and disconnects! So I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve yet to get my data off the drive which is why I still haven’t sent it back. Haven’t called customer service yet. I am sure that will make my day. Anyway, thanks for your article/blog; at least I know I am not alone with this problem and I can be prepared when I do make the call to WD.
Two 1TB My Book Pro Edition 2 just went bye bye here too.
Had them on a 0+1 array and a reboot later the drives no longer mount.
No luck with USB, FW400 or 800 even on other Macs.
Last week I returned a 1TB to Costco, was junk right out of the box.
A friend bought 8 of them, only two were working.
WD = Junk
Any chance that someone is initiating a Class Action lawsuit? How about contacting a consumer advocate TV or newspaper reporter? This kind of a rip-off without a recall of the product is criminal!!!
Oh Raoul,
you are killing me!I had been using two drives, a 1TB Maxtor, and a newer 1TB Western Digital Pro Ed II, to backup my video projects. A few weeks ago, the crappy Maxtor died, the clicking drive of death occurred right in the middle of a video edit- my response to this can be seen just after the the first ad of my show..
*yes shameless plug!!*
http://robotcast.cachefly.net/robotcast-episode6.m4v
Just when I thought I had really stuck it to ‘the Man’ with my clip, and fortunately had been able to recover some of the data to my WD Pro Ed- when THE WD PRO ED DIED!!! I swear, just last night the darn thing will not come on!! It was always twitchy when it came to access via my Mac G5, sometimes being visible and sometimes not. I too am about through here- I had always trusted WD internal drives, and this was my first external from them. I was disappointed.
Looks like I may have to put together another clip.
Just as soon as I can find a darn drive to edit my show on..
Where can I find out about either the effective replacement of my failed WD, or info on the class action.
Thanks for your post. Now I know..
-MoI
Hey guys,
As a MyBook owner, I am getting worried that my drive will eventually fail. No problem so far, except that it unmounts from my Mac G5 for no reason. For those who lost data to a firmware update, here a link to a page that explains how to fix the firmware (for PC):
http://do0g.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-recover-from-failed-mybook.html
I know how it feels to loose your life on a drive…
Cheers,
Philippe
I bought a Western Digital MyBook Pro Edition II 1TB to replace it with my Western Digital My Book 300GB and also to be able to mirror the drive for having a backup on the second drive.
My first mistake: Using the WD software to copy the files from the 300GB to the 1TB MyBook. IT ERASED ALL DATA on my 300GB.
After days and weeks of recovering my data from the 300GB I manually copied everything to the 1TB MyBook assuming it was an user error.
Since then the problems continued:
The 1TB overheats and it also shuts itself down randomly every so many minutes and back on again so that I can’t work with my data anymore.
It also doesn’t show my data on the drive any more, only folders are visible but NO CONTENT in the folders.
I paid over 300 dollars for this drive that erased all my data first and afterwards fails to show me my data at all and only displays it at random will, crashing every so many minutes.
I wish Western Digital replace my drive as well!
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This is crazy i always seem to loos data on my WD Mybook i cant seem to access it on my disk top at times some times its there and some times its not there i’ve lost so music that i’ve wrote this is crap
So here’s my update.
Ontrack was able to recover everything, most of it completely and a small bit at what they call %99. I have not gone through with the recovery yet and might not bother. It was my entire iTunes library (90gb) and database files (so iTunes will probably launch and be blank….I’m scared to death to even launch it), another 30gb of music waiting to be added to iTunes, many movies, and back up of my powerbook.
I went to WD’s site and went with kroll/ontrack, a buddy who is an IT guy in NYC said he’d trust no one but Ontrack. Also keep in mind my MyBook is a 1Tb set up as Raid-0, about the WORST scenario you could possibly encounter; I didn’t know, I wanted the full 1Tb.
Believe me I fully believe that WD should pay the bill or at least pay half, but you know the reality of that happening! I don’t know what I am going to do, I originally was told $500-1200 and prepared myself with vaseline to spend $1k, but $1500 is a bit too much for nothing that will make me money and that only wasted hours and hours of my time.
Greg, $1,500 is an insane amount to pay for the recovery of the data on the drive. I suppose if my photo library was lost, I might consider paying that much, but still, that’s just insane. Given that WD is at fault for the malfunctioning of this drive, if I were you, I’d look at getting a lawyer to get them to cover the full amount.
Raoul, if any of the data was essential to my business or perhaps lets say irreplaceable photos of my kids I might consider it. It still will take time for me to “re-collect” and organize the music and movies I had, a major inconvenience.
I’ll bet that WD and most manufacturers of drives have a clause in the literature that absolves them from any ancillary damages beyond the drive itself. I think that WD should recover people’s data from free if the drive fails within a certain time frame. Also the problem with a class action lawsuit is that the attorneys make a killing and the plaintiffs end up with a $3 check or a coupon for future product purchases.
If the price of recovery was half of what it is then I’ll bet that industry would double but the prices are really high and I’ll tell you, other places were telling me 2k-4k. A huge factor screwing me over was setting my drive as raid-0, that was a giant mistake. I did a lot of research on data recovery, there is a good series I mentioned on another similar blog that I found incredibly enlightening and helpful.
All of the data places said that they see every brand of drive coming back, not one place would endorse a particular brand. I think the key is redundancy and perhaps sticking with simpler single platter capacities. Of course to facilitate this potential recovery I went out and bought a $195 Lacie 750gb quad interface, and will probably build another 500gb or 750gb for a redundant backup. I will try to sell the WD warranty replacement if I can get a sealed unit or I’ll open the case and add my own fan….and never use raid-0!
Thanks for setting up this page and sorry we all had to congregate under these circumstances.
Greg, I’m glad to see you’re keeping cool about this. I know it would frustrate me to no end if I were in your shoes.
I’m using the WD Studio Edition drive (the one they gave me as a replacement) in RAID 0 mode, but I’m backing it up with Time Machine to a Drobo, at the very least daily, if not hourly. I use it in RAID 0 because I do a lot of photo editing and some video editing as well, and I want to get the best performance I can out of it (also have it connected with Firewire 800 to my MBP). I knew ahead of time what I was getting into when I set it at RAID 0, and your experience only reinforced it.
So yeah, my advice to people running any drive in RAID 0 is to back that thing up daily, and to not be surprised when they lose data. RAID 0 gives you better performance than a single-platter drive, but you can also pay through your nose for that performance when things go bad.
I agree that for your needs raid-0 is the way to go, and that dorbo sounds like a good back up strategy, but how much slower would it be if you just ran off the drobo instead? I just read a bit about drobo so not totally grasping it.
Also, I would take the MyBook case apart or at the very least elevate the unit and add a fan.
In some ways what happened to me was poetic justice for the riaa! I had my 80gb of itunes perfect, only a few missing tracks but I knew about them, I’ve had time to calm down but could still get in a rage! I had some items for my demo reel on the drive but I’m pretty sure I can rebuild it, and been out of the biz for too long to matter much.
It’d be plenty slow. The Drobo is USB 2.0, and the read rate for my Drobo, which is v1, (not v2, the one with Firewire) is about 24 MB/s, which is probably a best-conditions estimate. I work in Lightroom to edit RAW files, which are about 12-15 MB per file, and when I worked off the Drobo, it was painfully slow to sit there while the file would get read. And when I needed to browse through my photo library, there would be delays as I browsed while the thumbnails and previews would be cached off the Drobo. So that’s not an option for me.
I’ve been putting the My Book Studio drive through the paces, even writing (sustained) about 300 GB in one go to it (on two separate occasions), making no special accommodations for it on my desk, and it’s done great so far. No hiccups, no data loss, no shut-offs, just reliable performance. I tell you, my expectations were really low after my experience with the My Book Pro, but it’s done great so far.
I’ve managed to finally get the drive to work exactly as I expect it, but the conditions are sometimes hard to maintain at a hundred percent.
If I want to use drive, it HAS to be off when I power the computer up. Only after the OS has loaded can I plug it in. If it’s plugged in when the computer is turned on, it will then go in blow-dryer mode and overheat and shut down. After letting it cool off, plugging it back in only makes the problem repeat itself endlessly.
I bought it for RAID-1 capabilities, as now I have 750GB of files safely copied on two SATA hard drives. If worse comes to worst, I can open the unit, find out which hard drive went bad with an external USB to SATA device, and claim my replacement drive from Amazon (1 year) and WD (3 years).
Also, I’ve noticed I must try not to let the drive be inactive for over 30 minutes, as it might not be found by the OS immediately since it needs to spin up. This can cause 30 second delays, which some software does not tolerate waiting on and crashes.
Raoul, I didn’t know about the drobo and it’s slow speeds, that is a bit of a drag but at least it seems like a stable backup platform. It sounds like the new WD unit is performing well, I’d still be very wary but that seems like good news.
Did WD send you a new warranty replacement drive or a used one? I was planning on selling whatever they sent me but if they are reliable then I’d keep it and use the Lacie 750quad as a backup.
Nico Guevara, better start backing up your data, my drive started doing the same thing before the clicks of death.
Greg, they sent me neither. I don’t think what they did for me is standard practice for the My Book Pro edition users. They sent me a brand new My Book Studio Edition drive, no strings attached. If you’re in contact with WD about a replacement for your drive, please get them to clarify exactly what you’ll get for a replacement. I have a feeling it’s not going to be a Studio drive, but a refurbished Pro drive. Check to make sure.
I’ll make a point of that, I still have to get my drives returned from Ontrack, then I’m moving so I’ll have to wait a few weeks before dealing with WD. I’ll post back as things progress and again thanks for setting this up! I think there is a link to your page through wikipedia!
I bought book world edition II 2TB one week ago. It is extremely slow.
By default, this box is set to a linear mode. I tried to change it to RAID1. The formating process started but never finished.
Won’t buy anything by WD.
Hi!
Raoul, can you please change the end of the article from recommending MzBook Studio to recommending MzBook Studio II _
Thez are different models.
PS> Anz idea whz Windows changes mz kezboard lazout to US when tzping here ??? I removed “US” in Control Panel / Regional Settings / Keyboard and it worked OK for 3 or 4 words, then it switched back to US. But the control panel does not show US any more, so I can even remove it. Well, I guess that is something for another blog entrz …
Oh, anyone using the eSATA connector ? My Studio Edition 500GB has big problems with it.
Regards,
David
Just corrected the post, thanks! As for the keyboard layout issue, I have no idea; I guess it’s one of those Windows things…
Raoul, another update, I opted for the advance RMA option, essentially you buy the replacement drive and return the defective unit and they credit your account. I just received the replacement moments ago, it is a 2Tb MyBook Pro2 and appears to be new or at least a very clean refurbed unit.
I was considering selling whatever they sent me on ebay and making my own drive, I regret opening the plastic bag it came in but I looked on ebay and don’t see any of these units selling so that probably would be a lost cause. Well great it is a 2Tb so if it is set to raid-1 at least if something screws up I shouldn’t be hosed and I’ll have the 1Tb capacity.
Greg, glad to hear they’re at least replacing the 1TB drives with 2TB ones. I think the reputation of the Pro line is so bad nowadays that you wouldn’t get any decent amount of money for them, so using it would be the best option. And yeah, RAID 1 is the way to go.
I agree, I was bummed as I did want to get rid of this and assemble my own drive. The WD MBP2 ships as raid-0 by default, I used the WD raid manager to change that to raid-1, it is nice to at least have 1Tb capacity and two drives inside that are mirrored. I guess if I have a problem in the future I can put the “good” drive in an enclosure and still have the data.
My plan is to have two externals as backups and matched, the WD will hold my iTunes, again, and be used everyday since the lacie seems like a better more stable unit. When I was cloning from the lacie to the new WD, the WD got very warm. If you look at the case its very restrictive, I stopped the process and took the back off and the cage cover to access the drives and used two pens to sit the drive on in an attempt to increase airflow. The next plan for it is to add a quiet and sizable fan to the top or bottom and perhaps permanently modify the case.
I’ll post later for a status of this pig, hopefully it’ll be alive!
This fan idea I had seems to be keeping this drive very cool, the metal cage on top is cold to the touch. I bought the $18 115v, 120x120cm, 68cfm fan and used some 2″ #8 screw and nuts to act as legs and I just sat the WD drive directly on top of the fan so it’s blowing up from the bottom. I did take that super restrictive crappy plastic morse coded cover off, that helped but I could still feel a decent amount of heat, hopefully that’ll extend this pigs life. I’ll do a more permanent setup after I move and am settled in.
I am in the throws of reformatting My Book for a second time this year and have lost all files. It seems that while I have 900GB, I can’t seem to utilize more than 20% of the space before it goes bad. As a photographer, storage is essential. While I back my photos up to disc, my working photos are on this drive. These set backs are killing me! Glad to know it’s not something I’ve done but rather sounds like a bigger problem. Tech support is awful….
Hi Raoul,
Indeed I’m having the same problem with the same drive.
It just seems to be Narcoleptic, no offence to those who may have the condition.
We used this drive to backup student data on Mac OS X Server 10.4 in conjunction with SuperDuper. It worked fine for the best part of the academic year, but suddenly I wondered why it was failing almost every day. When I press the power on button at the front, I get an annoying buzz noise, but eventually it mounts on the desktop. It seems to be something todo with their stupid Green firmware which is supposed to be energy saving. Okay I’d expect it to spin down when idle, but NOT during a backup/file transfer !.
Initially this was all done on a FW800.
I read a few forums, strangely didn’t find this one, which suggested to upgrade the firmware which I did, but made no difference. During the year we upgraded to 10.5. It was still intermittent. So it’s since been sitting as a paper weight during the summer months as I’ve had other things todo. We got a Lacie 4TB backup RAID (4 bays) which seems to be working just fine.
I recently got it out again to test, doesn’t seem to work on FW400, but still mounts with FW800 and USB2. I tried on my PC to see if the same problem would happen with USB… overnight the drive keeps going to sleep/dismounting and not waking up til I press the power button. I believe it’s all to do with the enclosure and crappy firmware.. why on earth would a drive go to sleep when it’s in the middle of backing up.
What I could do is remove the 2x500GB drives and use them in a desktop machine or replace the caddy ? I don’t think I’d trust a RMAed one to get a scratched to F drive.
We also had trouble with the WD Passport 80GB and 120GB where the FW400 had died on at least 3 of our drives.
Fortunately the data on the drive doesn’t matter, strangely I reformatted on the PC yer when I put it back into the Mac, it’s showing the pre-formatted data ??? as if it hadn’t formatted even though it appeared to have.
FW seems to die on other drives too, so I think there’s an issue with FW where a power spike upon first insertion ?
So it seems many people are experiencing problems…..
I have just bought the 1TB World Edition II drive and within one day it has overheated at leat 8 times!!! I have tried to get WD but they say they are busy and will call me back.. Have they?? NO!!!
I am now attempting to get a refund from the company I bought it from but I hold little hope for that!
DON’T BUY THESE DRIVES!!!!
I’d say return it if you can, but if you are married to it then disassemble it and put it on top of a fan, it seemed to help mine (the replacement one).
Hello Raoul,
it’s me again. My first posting to your blog was on August 5, 2008 and since then I am mailing back and forth with WD to get my unit replaced (like you, I also covered my experience with them in my blog: http://www.verenaswelt.at/2008/08/05/never-ending-problems-with-the-western-digital-mybook-pro-edition-ii-1tb/). I had no idea how frustrating it is to deal with their customer service. But I can guarantee you that I will not buy another WD product again, although I have been loyal to them for the past ten years.
Verena
I strongly disagree! I have one WD 1 TB drive and it works fine, has so for almost a 1/2 year now (*knocks on wood*) but since I spend a lot of my time video-editing HD material, I needed a bigger drive. I bought the WD 2 TB version of the Studio Edition Line – BIG MISTAKE! I have a Macbook Pro 17 Inch and the drive keeps disconnecting all the freakin’ time! I have tried both the USB, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800. I tried eSATA at a friend’s place and this seemed more reliable, however, does this mean I have to spend another $100++ dollars to buy an eSATA cardreader? I shouldn’t right? I am gonna try to talk to WD soon, though after reading so much about their customer service, I am rather afraid of what I’m about to find. If you buy WD, it’s a gamble it seems whether or not your drive will work..! I’m gonna go for LaCie next time for sure!
> does this mean I have to spend another $100++ dollars to buy an eSATA cardreader?
If you do that, make sure it is one of the few WD “approves”. Their list is here :
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/resources/esataupgrade.asp
Hi, I have a wd mybook pro 500gb. After 2yrs time my drive started to make problems in firewire connected. So I plan to replace my drive within my warranty. so as the drive is not available today will i get a studio edition for my old mybook pro? please email to prince4world@aol.com
Unfortunately my experience with the Western Digital “My Book” 500GB unit was a disaster, too. I could not get the software to work, however it did start to do a backup, when I got an error, it stopped and the software reported the error. I read the report and it was “phone book” sized. Another backup attempt gave the same problem. The product does not work properly, I gave up. My only choice is to try some different software, if unsuccessful, I will bin the “dead book” drive and cross WD off my list for any future purchases I make.
Jack Chomley Australia
Nocturne, I suggest you buy more wood to keep knocking on or at least you’ll have something to beat the drive to pieces with when it does STB on you…best of luck to you (unless you are a WD employee).
I am upgrading from two 500gb mybooks that have worked ok some issues with mounting. (on Mac)
bought two “1.5 mybook pro edition ll”. (has a fan)
reformatted for apple 1 partition.
would mount under FW400 but not FW800, updated the “drivers” from WD website and all is well drive mounts fine and I am happy.
Information is hard to find but as long as you do not use the management software (remove using the installer software) this is just a case with hard drives just like any other.
most problems with hard drives are related to bad handling during shipping so its all a lottery regardless of manafacturer in my opinion.
those with issues on Mac update the WD drivers for the hard drive!!!!
I have six of the 1TB drives that I use for D2D backups in a enterprise environment that I move offsite. I also have one at home, and two of the Single Drive 500′s at home. I have experienced a little weirdness with Server 2003 with them, but they work flawlessly with XP save one annoyance.
The power management spins the drive down, and it annoys me when I want a file off of it and have to wait for it to spin back up. Additionally Backup Exec times out when it attempts to write to a sleeping drive. I wrote a simple script
echo %time% >>g:\time.txt
that writes the time to a text file one the hard driveonce every 10 min to keep it awake. Just use Scheduled tasks to run it automatically. This I do on both my XP workstation, and on our backup server, and voila no more problems.
A few things to mention. I didn’t install the WD RAID manager or any other software for the drives. Why install a bunch of crap from any manufacturer that just clogs up your computer. Everybody that has owned an HP printer knows what I am talking about!
I have used Firewire 400 and 800 and USB on all of the drives with little trouble except for on Server 2003 using fire wire, but a little trial and error messing with it got it working properly. It doesn’t claim to be compatible with Server 2003 anyway.
A class action lawsuit is ridiculous for this.
I have a WD My Book 500GB running with Windows XP. It worked for a few months, then it would drop more often. Windows would see it’s folders as all empty, which at first was alarming but then when I restarted I could see the data in there. Now, after a few more days, the blue light just circles endlessly and Windows will not recognize the device. I’ve just contacted WD but have yet to hear back. Hope my stuff is retrievable, though it’s all backed up elsewhere.
These things are supposed to just be simple devices. I never though this thing would malfunction.
Thanks for the encouragement Greg!
I finally had it with this drive, (see my previous post above about the 2 TB WD studio edition) – however, I’m working on a huge project and I can’t afford to wait for a replacement drive, thus having to ship this P.O.S in and wait for some weeks! I contacted the place where I bought it and they were gonna call WD for me. Let’s hope it’ll be OK, I’ll post back when I have something new… !
Someone help me, I’m at the end of my rope! I have the Western Digital 320GB Passport drive and my OS is Windows XP professional and the drive is connected to a USB port. The only good thing about it is the size of the drive. All I wanted was a slim frame drive with a lot of space. I didn’t realize that it came with a lot of extra crap that I have no use for: Google tools; Recovery tools (I already have 3 professional recovery programs, I didn’t need their useless program, and I already know how to sync my information), so I deleted all of the extra tools except for the Passport disk manager program, because I was afraid that my computer wouldn’t recognize the drive without it.
My problem is that since I’ve been using it – before I deleted the Anywhere BackUp tool, it I noticed that the drive will start up on its own and would begin some automatic file saving/backup/transfer process – when I never asked for it, and since I’ve never assigned a back up location I want to know what’s going on! The drive activity starts about every half hour, or so. Then after the process completed, I would get this pop up message indicating that my trial period for the Anywhere Backup program was about to expire, did I want to purchase… and when responded w/ “no thanks” my computer would freeze up as if the WD program would not accept the refusal. Often, I’d end up having to do a hard shut down my computer holding the power button down. After start up, the same dialogue box would pop up again but, would allow me to refuse/cancel out of the box. So, my first question is, where did my very private information go were my files transferred somewhere?? I am certain that my directory information is being requested from some other server because my Norton Antivirus tells me that a file needs my permission to transfer to some other server. I denied the request several times, and checked to see what the file is. When I opened it with Notepad, I can see that it’s a giant list of every single file directory on my LAPTOP, AS WELL AS on the WD drive. If it’s backing up my hard disk files, why the heck is is also quoting my LAPTOP file directory information??? I have disabled that process, but sometimes it manages to restart itsself and it tries to send the information. I can tell when the process has become enabled (how’d that happen???) because Norton antivirus Asks me if I will allow it…. If I say no, and if I take the steps to disable the process, how dare WD install a script to cause it to enable again. If it can do that, then who’s to say that it’s not Always sending the information. Maybe the glitch is that sometimes some process causes it to get stuck in my firewall.
Also, I noticed that if I restarted my computer with my WD hard drive connected, all processes pertaining to the hard drive take priority over some of the Windows start up processes, and take priority over the programs that I set to run first at startup. This would cause my computer to hang while waiting for the WD process to finish. Sometimes my firewall program would not start because of time out caused by the WD process. That happened frequently for about a month before I decided to delete the Back Up program & its folder from the hard drive.
Even though I deleted the back up stuff & the extra features, I still have these frequent occaisions where my USB mouse freezes up stops working while I’m in the middle of doing something. It actually disables my mouse and freezes my computer screen. I have to wait for the WD process to complete then I have to go to the device manager to enable the mouse again each time this happens. I know for sure that the WD drive is causing this because, during the freeze, if I happen to look down at the status tray, I can see the WD icon flashing – it turns from the royal blue color to a light blue color, whic is an indication that the drive is doing Something… so what the hell IS it doing? Is it still backing up something? I’m not saving anything. I’m not working with any file on the disk. My windows explorer folder is not open, there are no active files open, that are saved on the WD drive, so WHY is the drive active at all? And why does the activity take so long?
When it’s not causing the mouse to freeze up/becoming disabled then it seems to be causing my computer to go to blue screen and crash out. The last thing I check for is the WD icon in the tray flashing, then my computer suddenly goes to blue screen and restarts itself. I keep getting these BCCode : 10000050, errors and after restart, there’s a dialogue box saying that my computer has just recovered from a serious error, and something about mini dump, and I am positive that I’ve never had these problems before I began to use this F-ing drive.
This is really starting to tick me off. I’m worried about my privacy because I suspect that my files are being backed up to God knows where in WD-Privacy-Invading-Server-Land. I’m worried that all of the information that I recovered from those horrible Hitachi drives and transferred to the WD will be lost, and I’m worried that the WD drive is going to ruin my computer because it’s causing frequent crashes. I hate it, but now I have so much information on it I don’t know what to do next.
For now, I’m going to keep it unattached from my computer until the instant I have to save something, then I’ll save then unattach the exterior drive. That seems to be the only way to protect my computer, my data and my privacy….
I hope that the class action suit covers issues related to privacy too. I hate this thing.
Cti_girl, one thing you can do is to copy your data off the drive, then do a full format of the drive to delete everything off it. Also uninstall any WD software you may have installed on your machine from the drive or the CD that came with it. Make sure to get it all off. Once you do all this, if you connect the drive to your computer, it should act like a normal drive. You should be able to copy all of your data back to it, and it shouldn’t give you problems.
Here’s what I’ve found so far after having my original 1TB grenade with all of my movies and music and other crap.
If you get a sealed replacemnt SELL IT!!
If you need to use it take that crappy semaphore case apart (it’s really saying “caveat emptor”), buy 4″ fan, and get some 2″ #8/32 screws and nylock nuts, use the screws as legs for the fan, and sit the WD mess on top of the fan. That plastic case seems to be the kiss of death for this POS, reducing the airflow to nothing. Also I just find the WD MyBook to be very sluggish compared to the 750gb Lacie drive(fanless….scary), the Lacie is far more responsive and quicker. The fan mess I described will keep the WD pos cool and functioning but hopefully it is only a redundant BU.
Greg:
I found out about the “failure” after the first two weeks, there’s no reason for a drive to “disconnect” due to overheating, in worst case, it should just shut itself down, but what I’ve noticed is that the fan inside my WD 2TB doesn’t even work! I’ve never hear it trying to cool the beast down, and I think the fan inside it is the problem – however, after I found out that it was overheating, I took a table-fan and put that 5 cm away from the drive and put it on maximum speed. It still disconnects but the time it takes to disconnect seems to be longer than before (20 min before and approx. 1 hr now) – at the moment, I’m working away from my home so I don’t have a table fan, so I keep the drive by a window, but DAMNIT! It’s so frickin’ cold here I’m getting sick just by working with this drive! This drive should come with a warning; “this POS MAY damage your health!” – Lol. Anyway, I still haven’t heard back from the people that I bought it from and it’s been a week. Either they’ve forgotten about me, or they haven’t gotten in contact with WD. I have to finish this project in two weeks and then I’ll send this POS back and then we’ll see what happens. I don’t want a replacement drive, I want my MONEY BACK! I paid over 400 Euros for this thing! Goddamnit!
Same problem here with WD MyBook Pro 500GB. Yesterday all folders and files disappeared! The disk is still available, it says some 200GB of data is there, but i can not see it.
As an artist / photographer i lost signficant part of my work from last 2 years. I will have to try & pay the data recovery service.
If there will be initiated the lowsuit against WD inform me please so that i can join!
Moreover – it SHOULD be initiated and eventually some EU legislation changes should be considered against companies for the protection of consumers.
Recently i had a similar story with completely misfunctioning HP printer which cost me some 250 euros of extra costs to finaly find out that it was a firmware bug they did not know about. No compensation was done by HP at all, of course.
I work for an international company of similar size as well. I see every day the same “sell and forget about quality” aproach practiced by managers around.
These general standards of selling short lifecycle goods will ruin the planet resources very soon. I think all companies should be responsible for a reasonably longer lifecycle of their products, for all demages they couse, and for complete recycling of all their products later.
Just my bit of eco-ethic-liberal view on the current machinery.
******
Shoot your local corrupted politicians and the top managers who failed to test MyBooks properly!
That’s a joke, of course. But aren’t they joking as well in WD, HP, etc.??
Got a similar unit, WD My Book Studio Edition II.
Bought it primarily for eSATA and RAID1.
Thought i could use the eSATA and hide the HDD far apart from my PC. The catch is I can’t boot XP from it, and yes my bios support booting from eSATA.
Needless to say both read/write speeds over eSATA in RAID1 are significantly (read as 20-40%) lower versus my two year old 7200rpm non-Raptor SATA disk.
So the problem is either the SATA electronics, or the way they implemented RAID.
WD openly lies about the units being able to On/Off automatically with your PC. Once turned off, the unit stays turned off, unless you keep the power adapter plugged (which consumes 7watts even when the HDD is OFF/Unplugged from the adapter)
Regardless of what they call it, it is just an “Auto Sleep/Wake” function. That would have been more accurate, and some like me would have not bought the unit.
The backup software provided does not work on 64bit systems, and it is NOT mentioned in the product page, but a download page on WD Support site.
Very disappointed.
I’m not returning the unit, nor am i going to use it. I will need it to be able to join any class action lawsuits to be initiated!
Do NOT buy anything from “WD MY BOOK” line if you are:
- a MAC user. The majority of reporters are MAC users, not because the unit works better in Windows, but because a lot of people buy these for their “mac-alike” look. Check Google/Mac forums. (and no, I am not a fanboy, i own nothing from Apple)
- looking for moving out your internal HDD outside the case using the eSATA
- RAID1 user (can’t say anything about RAID0, haven’t used it)
Muza, I own a 2TB My Book Studio Edition, and am very happy with it. The thing to keep in mind about RAID 1 is that it’s called “mirroring” for a reason. It has to write the data twice, once to each of the two drives. That means, by design, that it’s going to be slower than writing the data to a single driver, no matter what protocol you use (eSATA, FW400/FW800, USB). You might not see it as much with a slower protocol where the RAID controller has time to catch up with the drives since the troughput isn’t as fast, but you’ll see it with eSATA for sure, like you mentioned. This isn’t a fault, it’s just the way things work with RAID 1. Try it with RAID 0 and you’ll see the throughput go up.
Thanks Raoul,
I was expecting around 10-15% slowdown in RAID1 which is okay (a few google finds mention around 10% difference), but not upto 40% slower vs RAID0.
Anyway, my biggest problem is still the power part of the unit.
I was really caught by that “Auto On/Off” feature listed, like Nintendo Wii’s Power unit, almost zero consumption while plugged but powered down.
So everytime one unplugs the HDD from the power outlet, the unit has be explicitly turned ON once plugged back, using the Power button. And I am not even mentioning that the Power button is on the back of the unit, which does not make any sense.
Those might look like minor issues to many others, but people are different, so is the individual perception of the value for money.
Can you test how the power management is working on yours? Maybe my unit is defective after all.
Muza, I can’t say I’ve had the same problem with the Power button on my drive. I think the few times I plugged it back in after unplugging it, I may have had to press the button, but I can’t remember. At any rate, I don’t do it very often (it mostly stays plugged in), so it hasn’t bothered me at all.
I bought a WD My Book Pro Edition II NAS a few months ago. I never had any problems with overheating until a month ago and as usual it simply shut down with flashing lights on the front. I couldn’t believe the unit was actually overheating because it was kept in the loft and only a roof tile from being outside. As we are in december you can imagine this is a very cold place but still after a few hours of use the same problem appeared. I found a website called http://kyyhkynen.net/stuff/mybook/ which has a tutorial to install an alternative temperature monitor software. I’ve now had this in use 24 hours for a week with no problems at all so I can only imagine the unit has a fault with the sensor software or sensor which claims the unit is overheating when it’s simply just warm. I remember having quantum atlas 10k drive years ago which ran much hotter with no problems. Either way I have to say thanks to this person as it has saved my drive from a visit to the dumps so I thought it best to share my experience.
I connected My Book to my iMac Leopard and soon enough my iMac was fried. They tolf me the capacitors went. I only had the iMac for 3 years. I am not sure My Book caused it. Any idea? Also I nowwant to buy a PC but the data is formated by the Mac. Any idea how I can get the data out and on to my new PC?
Thanks
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Just bought the 1TB Studio II Edition and experienced strange clicking sounds beginning with the first start up. I really feared the mighty click of death and needing to go through the whole WD “service” procedures. In the end I downloaded the new firmware installer from the WD website, installed it – and up to now the drive is quiet. Hope it stays that way.
My 1T book died very unexpectedly. I lost my entire mp3 collection as well As backups to three pcs I also use regularly. Crap.
Drive is 1year old
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I also have a WD product, the MyBook Premium II. One day all of a sudden both the Firewire 400 & 800 ports just stopped working. I went through all the support guides and updated the firmware as well. No luck. My iMac C2D will not see the HD when plugged in via FW. It does still work using the USB connection. I’m nervous about this as this unit has already been RMA replaced once. I’m cutting my losses and I ordered a G-Tech drive and I”m simply going to swap out the hard drives and put them into the G-Tech enclosure. I wold never buy a WD unit ever again.
I have two of these MyBook World 1TB pieces of junk … both suffer from overheating and random shutoff … i have them in pieces at the moment simply trying to rescue my data from them. Once i recover my data, the MyBook drives are going out with the trash. The shop i purchased it from misleadingly advertised them as external hard drives rather than NAS drives. Do not buy this piece of garbage.
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My “My Book Pro Edition II” had other issues.
Drive A or mostly Drive B keept failing intermittent. After a reboot of the device they could run for another 4-12h before failing again.. (usually, sometimes one of the drives failed within 10min).
And hostly, it is not a fast drive, and any external USB drive on 7200rpms drives are much faster, even if the device is connected to a 1GB Network,it is slow.
On the other side, maybe it was slow cause of my Drive faults…but I rather believe the controler card is slow.
At this moment, I can not recommend anyone to buy this stuff. Luckely I got my money back. And I spent a lot of hours with this device, trying to understand if I did something wrong.
I posted up here a while ago, I had a drive that crapped out and lost all my data, WD sent me a new/refurb (I couldn’t tell but I guess it’s a refurb) 2TB drive to replace my 1TB. The best advice I can give to anyone using the raid setup and to have it last is to take the poorly ventilated morse coded cover off the unit and sit it on top of a muffin fan. I’ve been doing that and the drive has been able to stay cool and happy. I bought a line voltage fan and used 4 nuts and bolts for legs, then sit the HD on top of that so it blows right into the cavity where the two drives live. It’s ugly but it should prolong the life of the POS WD MyBook Pro2. You have to take the cover off because the morse coded cover is so restrictive that even sitting that on the fan isn’t enough. I hope this helps someone, but most likely if you’re here you are already in trouble.
I was having problems with my WD Pro II drive. At first, it took about 5 minutes to load an MP3 file, so I took the unit apart and ran WDLD on each drive. One of the two 750GB drives failed (Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics reports “too many bad sectors on the drive” and cannot continue) while the other holds 100% of my data intact.
I’m afraid to lose all my data due to a crappy WD drive, but fortunately I have enough HD space on other SATA drives to back everything up and deal with it.
To everyone who’s been through this, what other brands and model drives have you tested? How did they work out for you?
@ Greg;
I have been doing the same thing – I also wrote back a while ago – I contacted the company that sold me the WD 2TB drive but they told me WD wouldn’t get back to them (it’s been 2 months) so I decided to set up a table-fan behind the WD drive. This is the ONLY thing that seems to make the drive not disconnect automatically and by itself every 15 min. I advice everyone who thinks about buying a 2 TB drive to go for Lacie or some other brand, and if you already bought the cat in the bag, buy a table fan or a smaller one like Greg suggested and cool the bastard …
Nocturne, I was amazed at how warm the unit is inside with the covers in place AND while sitting on top of the muffin fan, I strongly suggest removing the cover too! Also having the WD unit sitting on top of the muffin fan lets the air blast up through the tight cavity where the drives actually sit and to cool them directly, as a test you can put your finger on the drive and see how warm it is. I’m just being ultra paranoid after losing a lot of personal data.
I could be wrong but the conclusion that I came to is that this was strictly a heat event causing the drive to fail, I’m not very tech savvy about the inner workings and stuff so I could be wrong. I do not use this drive the way I used to, now I just use it as one of my redundant back ups. I bought a 750gb Lacie d2 Quadra and this 2tb WD MBP2 is now set up as raid-1 (originally I had it raid-2 and striped…..I didn’t know!!).
I called several data recovery places, and sent it to Kroll Ontrack, the best they would do was $1200, I didn’t go for it, none of my data would make me a dime. Talking to many different data recovery companies, they all said that every HD fails, it’s not “if” it is “when”. None would recommend a brand to go with, I thought the lacie I bought was good but a buddy who uses drives for video exclusively uses G-drives (very expensive) and swears them as solid and said his buddy at tekserve in nyc said that the lacie’s that I bought (and on sale at tekserve) were being returned like crazy. Perhaps this was just salesmanship, who knows. The reality is that it seems that allof this is just about case design as what’s inside is WD, Seagate, Hitachi. I have a new WD scorpio 250gb internal drive in my old powerbook g4 and it’s fine. The problem here seems to be WD’s awful MBP2 enclosure as far as I can surmise…..go get a fan!
Add me for the class action, bought this for the firewire port, it works only on USB…
Count me in for a class action. I’m suffering from the ails others have complained of. I am trying frantically to recover my irreplacable pictures, computer management says the drive is “unreadable”. Any tips someone could volunteer ould be greatly appreciated!
Ha! My Home Edition did the same thing with two of my 2.4GHz iMacs! My drive would stop working after about half an hour of backup, then lock up my iMac… I unplugged the Firewire cable, and would free up the Finder.
I cracked open the case of the MyBook, and the internal HD was too hot to touch! I purchased a Thermaltake BlacX, and I plugged the WD internal from the MyBook to it… this worked. I could retrieve the files from the drive… which makes me believe that it’s the MyBook case that overheats the internal drive, with probably overheats the MyBook control board and locks it up.
I will never buy, or recommend a MyBook! The bad news… I have purchased two of them, and recommended them in the past. Now, my father’s MyBook has failed! Western Digital, you are making me look bad… by the way, although it’s only USB2… I LOVE my Thermaltake BlacX for backup!
Hello all, I’m a Mac System administrator. One of the employees at a client of mine sent me a link to this post…
I just had a Pro Edition II 2TB (Raid 1) fail at one of my client’s, 550GB of data on the drive!!!
Basically drive would crash the finder when accessing it, could distinctively hear nasty clicking noises coming from the drive.
Fortunately, I managed to salvage all the Data, as even if the drive is under warranty, WD will charge you an arm an a leg for recovery if you send the drive for replacement, let alone the down time for the company while the Data cannot be accessed.
All I had to do is to open the enclosure, disconnect only drive A, connect it to the Mac, turn it on and listen for clicking noises… still heard noises at the 1st try, so turned it off, disconnected from the Mac, reconnected drive A but disconnected drive B, and voilà!!! no more clicking noises, no more finder crashing, I managed to migrate the Data safely to a RAID 5 LaCie enclosure, so I can send the unit back for warranty repair and avoid the costly Data Recovery service.
The problem my client had with this drive is that one of the drives in the mirror RAID array was failing BUT did not fail completely, therefore hampering the finder when trying to access Data on the drive. As soon as the failing drive was disconnected, it behaved properly again. I am suspecting overheating which is often the case when a drive fails but I do not know for sure.
BAD NOTE:
The WD Raid manager is in my opinion a real POS. Completely useless except to initialize the RAID level for the enclosure. Even with the newest version installed, all it was mentioning was that there was a problem with it, and to call tech support. Since the drives are “User replaceable” according to WD, the least they could do was to have the WD Manager tell me if the bad drive is A or B no? I think WD should provide the users with a decent troubleshooting tool for their drives.
Also, when I got the data out, the drive had the cover removed, and I found it strange that the fan spun only at startup, then came to a stop and never spun again during the 6 hours or so it took to extract the 550GB. I have found that there is a firmware update available that addresses fan issues, I’ll have to check it out, do some tests and post my findings. Maybe having the cover off kept the drives running cool enough so the fan did not need to turn on but I’ll test it out fully when I’m done with that client’s issue.
I find that WD’s Data recovery service is a devious way to make money off the back of their clients, especially in my client’s case where all they would have needed to do to fix the unit would have been to remove the failed drive, replace it by a new one, let the RAID 1 rebuild itself and ship it back. I was actually thinking of doing this for my client as the price of a new WD GreenPower 1TB drive would have been a lot cheaper then the cost of their Data Recovery service.
I will get in touch with WD today to arrange for warranty replacement/fix and post the progress.
GOOD NOTE:
I have other clients with the same drive and no other one as failed. I also know other people personally who has MyBook drives and none of them have reported any problems at all with them. I also tested the unit on different machines, from MDD G4′s, iMacs G5, iMacs Intel white and Aluminum models, PowerBook G4, MacBook and none of them had issues with any port at all. Never tested one on a PC though.
I also have tested the transfer rate of both FW interfaces and found it to be quite decent actually, even in the slower RAID 1 configuration. Not quite as fast as my LaCie single Drive FW800, but very close. Don’t have the exact numbers handy atm as this was last year, but I had more then 2GB/mn sustained READ from it in RAID 1 and almost 3GB/MN in RAID 0 (based on rouglhy 60GB of data comprised of half large files, half multiple small files, the same exact Data was used in all the tests. The fastest transfer rate I have seen with FW800 Drives was with my LaCie drives which hit a tad over 3GB/mn sustained: My 2.5″ LaCie Rugged, and my RAID LaCie Biggest FW800 4Drive array, but only in RAID 0.
NOTE TO Barriky: who complained about his “World Edition” Gigabit Ethernet drive having trasfer rates of only 4MB/sec, that sounds like if the drive was connected to a 100Mbps switch/router… Is it the case? if so, it’s only normal that the transfer chokes at the switch…
Anyway, I’ll be back to let you know what happened with the warranty replacement.
sudoMac, if it is raid-1 doesn’t that mean that the drives are mirrored??
Can’t you put the drive(s) in another enclosure and retrieve the data??
All WD will do is to send you a replacement product, kiss your data goodbye, that’s what happened to me. My suggestion is to take the enclosure apart and stand the thing on top of a fan, mine is running this way (but I only use this drive occasionally, as a redundant back up).
To greg,
Yes, Raid 1 means it is mirrored. Putting the drive in an enclosure “might” work for a mirrored set, but to be honest I have never tested it. I know for a fact it will not work for a striped (raid 0) or raid 5 array as the files are split on multiple drive. Trying to do so on such arrays is very delicate, and procedure may vary depending on the type of RAID controller in the original drive.
I am not sure if pulling a single drive from that mirrored RAID and putting in a regular SATA enclosure would actually work because of the lack of a RAID controller in the other enclosure. It would be fun to test though, I will definitely try it before shipping back the drive for repair, just for curiosity! That would be awesome if it worked in case the problem would be the controller instead of the drive…
Hehe, I usually don’t want to try disturbing RAID arrays unless absolutely necessary, it is VERY easy to mess up an array and lose all the data. Also, typical Data Recovery services cost a lot more for RAID arrays then single drives, mostly due to the complexity involved to properly match split files from different drives.
Fortunately for my client, simply disconnecting the failing drive as I mentioned in my original post solved the problem of accessibility, I could actually have reconnected it to the server with only 1 drive working and let them use it until I receive a replacement drive, but from what I understand from WD, they won’t just ship a new hard drive for you install yourself, but insist on having the complete unit sent back to them. Why bother making those drives user-replaceable if one has to wait for the warranty period to be over to be able to take advantage of that feature? Most likely by the time the 3 year warranty is up, they would have outgrown its capacity and moved on to a bigger one…
My client’s data has now completely been moved to another Raid 5 array, seems to be all fine for now but I will still need to check for data integrity (going back there tomorrow to put everything back online through their server, I managed to make accessible the files they needed to work for the next few days to avoid downtime to the company).
All is left now is to see what WD will actually do for replacement. Will it be a Studio Edition II as another poster in this thread mentioned? Hopefully!
Will keep you posted.
OK, I just re-read and understand how you dealt with the data, mine was raid-0, I didn’t know any better! I got fkd, and kroll wanted $1200 to recover the data, I declined as it was all personal crap. WD sent me a 2TB my book pro2 as a replacement, my original unit was a 1TB my book pro2. I’m sure they don’t send individual drives because it’s cheaper faster and easier to replace an entire unit and also WD has a pile of these drives that they refurbed so I wouldn’t get your hopes up for some “newer” model.
If you have clients using these things I’d strongly suggest another device to back it up, you see the long list of woeful tales here!
I went to the client yesterday to restore full functionality to the server after migrating the data to my Raid 5 array, all seems to be working beautifully!
Ran out of time so did not ship the drive back yet for warranty fix but I did test removing the drives and putting them in a USB external enclosure as greg suggested in the post above this one:
It actually worked, I managed to have full access to the files (only from teh working drive, the failing one ended up hanging the finder but did mount), so it would seem that in the case of the Pro Edition II, if the Raid is set as 1 (mirror) the raid controller could actually blow and the data would still be intact and easily recoverable by simply putting one of the drives in another enclosure. that is assuming only 1 of the drives is having a problem.
Since I have the weekend to fool around with the drive before sending it back, I’ll test to see if I can actually move a Raid 0 (stripped) pair of disks in another raid 0 enclosure and still access the files. If so, that would mean that in the event of a blown controller, one could salvage the data before shipping the unit back to WD.
Of course it would be useless in case of a drive failure in Raid 0.
About my clients using these drives for data storage on their servers, they all have a Tape Backup system in place as well, the mirroring was set up to add redundancy, not to be relied on solely as a backup, and also to minimize the downtime. Retrieving 500GB or so from a Tape Backup system would prove to be extremely long. On top of that someone would need to check regularly to swap tapes when needed, unless of course the tape backup is a Tape Library with autoloader, which is quite expensive. Not a single one of my clients invested in a tape Library, but we are talking about small to medium size businesses.
I personally was always a little weary of Raid 0 (striped) arrays. Sure they are faster but having dealt many times with hard Drive failure, I tend to opt for a safe solution rather then a fast one. If I would to setup a raid 0 array, I would make sure I mirror it with another drive for redundancy.
Now we’ll see how WD will deal with my warranty request, one thing that I am wondering about is shipping/brokerage, since the drive is located in Canada. A friend of mine who is a PC tech has been charged brokerage when a replacement drive was shipped back to him. The carrier did not charge duty taxes as it was a replacement item but wanted $35 or so for brokerage. That makes the warranty exchange almost as expensive as replacing the drive altogether as his was a 250GB SATA 3.5″ drive, he had to pay around $25-30 to ship it back so the total would have been $60-65… After jumping through hoops with WD support, they agreed to re-imburse him the cost of brokerage, he had to send them the brokerage fees invoice from the carrier, they actually did send them a check.
To be followed…
My Drive Just stopped working. Died… Won’t start. The Tech support for Western Digital, trying to get the parts that I thought were needed… However, he explained to me that the way the drive works, you cannot simply change the parts. The board that died is tied to the hard drives, and if it were exchanged you would lose all of your data. The only way the data could be recovered is if I send it to a Data Recovery place, which is very expensive. I have my life work on this drive. I don’t know what to do.
To Mentu:
If your drives were striped (Raid 0), then WD techs are right in the sense that if the RAID controller has blown, then the striping information is not available anymore as it is located in the controller. As far as attempting to change the controller, what will most likely happen (did not verify it but it is the most likely scenario) is that the controller will build a new RAID set instead of rebuilding it from the drives and will wipe out the data at the same time. Since it is striped, each file resides partially on both drives, making it very hard for standard data recovery software to rebuild even a single file.
Some RAID controllers have to capability of rebuilding a RAID 0 set in case of controller failure, but those are quite advanced controllers usually in the form of a PCI card, I would be very much surprized that these WD desktop drives would have such a controller.
But if the drives were mirrored though (Raid 1), the controller doesn’t store any striping information it simply copies the data to both drives, and you can simply put any of the 2 drives in a SATA enclosure or mount it internally in a tower computer and you should be able to access your Data there. I tested it a couple of weeks ago, check my earlier posts.
At this point it is delicate as I am not sure if a controller of a different brand would actually recognize the striping configuration of the one that failed. I am not an expert in Raid recovery but I can tell you it is very delicate and you need to have the right equipment for the job.
The best advice I can give you at this point is to shop online for data recovery services and get some quotes before telling WD to go ahead and recover your Data, prices vary tremendously.
You will have to keep in mind that they will need a working drive to put the extracted data, so if your drive was still under warranty, maybe WD will be cheaper if they handle it as “I think” they might just end up shipping you your drive fixed – you’ll have to verify what is the procedure with them – with your Data restored instead of you having to send the defective drive to another Recovery Centre, purchase a working drive to store the Data and ship back to WD the failed drive for Warranty replacement/repair and end up with 2 drives…
How much data was there on anyway? and what percentage of the drive space was taken?
Regardless it will be quite expensive, but they usually charge on a “per GB” basis…
Good luck with that… I truly sympathize, I’ve been through that route before but ended up taking the loss of my Data as I couldn’t afford recovery services at the time. Had some files backed up but not all, like a lot of users…
At the risk of sounding condescending, I have to add this: you should strongly consider making backups of all your important files, I usually think of Hardware failure not as “IF” it ever happens but “WHEN” it will happen, as pretty much everyone will experience sooner or later some form of hardware failure and loss of Data. The larger the drive, the larger the potential loss. The reason I do buy dual drives like these is to actually have redundancy in my data by setting the RAID to mirror both drives, just in case. The Striped RAID is somewhat faster in read/write performance, but at the cost of “zero” redundancy, any component of the unit fails and one loses all his Data. This configuration should be used strictly for performance when needed (like pro audio/video rendering etc), not for storing important data. Then again, the performance gain wouldn’t be too good in USB 2, but with FW800 or eSATA there should be a notable difference. Still would not be as fast as if it were internal though.
Backups should never be taken lightly, rough way to find out though… Also providing a source of “clean” power such as plugging your drive/computer in a Battery Backup unit helps tremendously in avoiding potential damage from electrical surges etc.
Thank you very much for this information.
I’m sorry I didn’t find this site before I purchased the drive. I have a WD Mybook World Edition II 1.5TB, which on day one had an overheating issue.
Unlike some who have written before me I have always hated Raid 0 and quickly set about changing it to Raid 1. I have a separate WD in a USB case for my backup that will likely be changed later this year before it starts showing signs of failing.
After reading almost everything that has been posted I have taken a very simple but warranty voiding step of screwing four 6g x 20mm (3/4 in) stainless steel self tapping screws into the bottom of the casing. Each screw is only one to one and a half turns into the case so there is no chance of any of them contacting anything inside the case. On top of this two screws are in positions that do not allow access to the rest of the case. This has raised the case off my desk and has cured the problem.
Now no more overheating and it looks pretty cool.
One more thing. This drive was never going to be a main drive or a backup. It is simply there to give me access to all my images, about 100gb, from anywhere. I was never going to trust all that to any single drive. Currently there are copies on five separate drives at any given time.
OldDuck, sit the entire drive on top of a fan so it forces the airflow through the case and past the drives inside. The MBP2 I have was made to be taken apart so I removed the plastic “semaphore” cover and it works ok to cool it. When the “semaphore” cover was in place and it was on top of the fan it still ran warm, it’s an amazingly restrictive to the airflow. Here’s some pix of what I did to mine, extremely simple:
[IMG]http://i27.tinypic.com/282f3pu.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i31.tinypic.com/20shoy8.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i29.tinypic.com/2utkwuc.jpg[/IMG]
[IMG]http://i25.tinypic.com/15ogprs.jpg[/IMG]
Just copy and paste w/o the code: [IMG] [/IMG]
Update from Matt re 1.5TB drives in use since Oct 2008 OSX 10.5.7 : To all, very few seem to mention the need to update the Driver in the Mybook’s, go to WD website and find the “updated drivers” for your hard drive, the drivers they ship with do not work well on OSX or any machine I know of.
My drives do run flawlessly and wake from sleep and do not overheat.
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Old comment # 86 – from Oct 2008
bought two “1.5 mybook pro edition ll”. (has a fan)
reformatted for apple 1 partition.
would mount under FW400 but not FW800, updated the “drivers” from WD website and all is well drive mounts fine and I am happy.
those with issues on Mac update the WD drivers for the hard drive!!!!
I have a my book studio edition 750gb and it f*** up within 2 months and I only use it once the day I got it. This company sucks a** if I was to say.
I have a my book studio edition 750gb and it f*** up within 2 months and I only use it once the day I got it. This company sucks a** if I was to say.
“WD Sucks!”, I edited out your swear words. I do not allow vulgar language on my site. The next comment with similar language will be deleted. I also don’t like it when people don’t use their real names.
Follow-up regarding the drive replacement / RMA request:
WD shipped the replacement drive late June, but it took over 4 weeks for the company to receive it !!!!
Ended up going there to do the transfer of their files to the new drive but got 2 surprizes, one good, one bad:
The good one is that they sent a Studio Edition II to replace the Pro Edition II, in the same 2TB capacity as the original drive, so Bonus there !!!
The bad one is that I sent the power supply with it as per instructed on their RMA return form, they specify that when returning any external drive to ship back the power supply in the box. Unfortunately, what the company received was just the drive… No disc, no power supply, do cables… Back to square one, RMA again!!!
Ended up calling them, they excused their mistake and told me that within 7 working days we should receive the full “accessory pack” that came with the new drive.
Well that took almost 3 weeks, it is there now, but had n o time to go and install it so I haven’t doublechecked myself the contents of the package…
I find the delays in the RMA from WD to be quite excessive, although in the end the client will end up having a b etter product than they purchased originally.
…to be followed !!!
I’ve purchased my last “My Book” from WD … my 4th drive has just failed! These are the most un-reliable drives I’ve ever experienced!
I just finished contacting Western Digital about my My Book Pro II, the device has ceased functioning via the firewire interface. Initially I considered the problem to be drive failure as it would not load all the files and then hang finder (I’m running leopard). After getting upset about loosing over 500GB of data I put up an RMA for the drive and sent a support email to WD.
After looking some information up (including here ty) I discovered that the usb interface might work, so I tried.. and like magic the drive mounts if only very slowly.
- The drive no longer mounts at all or only partially when using the FW800 interface
- The FW400 doesn’t respond
- USB works but its extremely slow
I’ve had to drag out my old server box (a G4 Powermac which this item replaced and doesn’t have all the space I need to store all this data) and slowly transfer 500gb at usb 1.0 speeds.
I am NOT happy at all
Help, My Book Office 500GB isn’t recocnized by my Hp Pavillion PIII Desktop. it has to be something with the new JAVA installs and updates these days as that is when it quit on me. what utility at WD will help be to make this USB readable again… HELP I backed up everything on here and my C: is full… even after deleting all my duplicate folders… HELP PLEASE… It is not being recognized at all and the light is ON continuosly on the External…
Oh PS… running Window XP on Desktop and Vista on Laptop… can I run this drive on both when I get it running again?
I bought my WD My book (1TB) in 2006. Now, 2009, I´m also member of the Click,Click death club. Thanks to Western Digital!
Hello, What are the two silver drives that seem to be good, next to the computer to the left of the WD hard drive? Do you have any suggestions for good Network Attached Storage drives? Thanks.
I read most of these posts and must say that a lot is over my head. I purchased a WD mybook pro edition with a 300gb storage. I have a gateway laptop pc and this drive stopped working. I get a message that asks me to format the disk. Since I have most of my vacations, family and work pics on this drive, don’t want to lose them but can’t afford $1200 either. I am not a tech and need help that I can understand. In command prompt I get a message saying it does not contain a recognizable file system. When I tried the command “chkdsk” as suggested, still nothing.
Is my data lost unless I pay this rediculous fee?
There’s one thing that every data recovery service I had called seemed to agree on, and that is that all drives will fail at some point and the rule is have your data in three places to improve your odds of not getting buggered. Sure some are worse than others, and unfortunately we all seem to have gathered here around that point.
Gatt, have you tried using the other methods of connection (usb/2, fw 400/800,etc), or tried attaching it to another machine?? Also before you do so be prepared to copy the data off the drive at that time, it could very well be the last time it is accessible, if it mounts and can be read.
I have been using the replacement 2TB WD MBP2 as a back up drive and it is off most of the time, and I have disassembled the case and set the drive on top of a fan blowing directly up through the unit to insure that it stays cool. I’m making a huge assumption that that was my initial problem.
I currently have been using mine as a USB drive, however, the event log says there is a paging error on the drive, and now WinXP SP3 will not recognize the drive anymore. Thinking it was maybe XP SP3, I hooked it up to an SP2 but no luck. Also tried plugging directly into wall outlet. Maybe I should have plugged my fingers in instead! I may buy a firewire cable, and try that next. Not sure how to take the drive apart, but I’m sure the info is out there. No loud drive noise, just not recognized.
Gatt: (WD mybook pro edition 300Gb) I can explain you what to do, but not one minutes if you are not an expert (like Lego you can deal)
1. You have to pull (disassamble) the unit
2. Se, what kind of HDD inside, IDE or SATA
3. Disassamble your PC, motherboard support or not 300GB (in older models only IDE is, place to IDE2, can set Muster- wih jumper)
4. If fits 300GB, plug in, power and IDE cable (before switch off the PC of course!)
Reset PC, clikc Del until boot, see if recognised the WD 300GB.
5. If recognised, wait, see in My computer, what can you see, if nothing,
you have to install Getdata back program, you must have enough place in the other (original) HDD.
GHet data back gets back data, in case you formatted teh HDD, but don’t copy any files into 300GB, you will loose datas!!!
If you can’t do something, contact me: ltoth@uze.net
Cheers!
Wow, I stumbled on this page by just trying to find out more about mybook. Ive had the WD MyBook for two years. Its 2 drives are set by default as one 1TB and its been sat under my tv next to my wii and xbox all this time switched on. Ive always wondered how it worked thermally as the shelf its on has not even enough room to put a finger on top of the device. My system backs up automatically every week and its now filled 540gig over half its capacity. Its never let me down but am now thinking about putting it on the top shelf and putting pencils underneath it. Is it really that bad???
Mionet is garbage! How do you ftp into your files from elsewhere through a Linksys router?
My supposedly trustworthy My Book 2 TB drive has only been with me for 6 months. Strictly a backup – but very important, with the last 4 years of my life backed up on this P.O.S.
It failed today, and with no warning – nothing. $200 I spent on this supposed “solution” for Mac’s Time Machine.
I’m hoping to be able to recover my very important files ; what a disappointment.
Western Digital needs to get out of the HD business. Their stuff truly is CRAP.
-JT.
I’ve got two of these. Both identical, though one has a slightly different PSU. One works flawlessly on FW800, 400 and usb (not tried eSATA). The other only works properly on USB. Firewire drops after about 10 minutes. I tried swapping the PSU just in case it was faulty. No change. I swapped the drives from one case to the other. It still unmounts of it’s own accord. I’m leaving it on USB for now and using it as a backup as I certainly can’t edit HD video from it, which I can with the other one. I’m tempted to purchase a new Raid FW800 case and install the drives in that. It just seems like a waste of money to get what I should already have! Time to look for an alternative I think.
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this my second WD drive ….the first shows on my desktop when it feels like it!!!!,i did not bring it back because i had it too long and did not use it,but when i did start using it ,it worked for a about a month and after that it would mount sometimes ,and did not want to go thru all that stuff in the shop and maybe it was my problem ….too new to go wrong
anyway…………maybe a year later i got a new same make thinking it cant happen twice ,and this one is just as bad ,i have used it twice …this time i have the box and i am going to take it back to the apple shop
its bull shit how can apple be selling this shit ,because it not just me
i have lacie hard drives and that works ok……but not good with canon video camera when you up load video to the mac computers
bullshit…………something needs to be done
My WD My Book Pro Edition II decided not to cooperate. At first, I have experienced problems with iTunes library, only to realise that I was not able to access some/most/all information on the drive some/most/all the time.
Not very competent and helpful first line support person took thirty minutes of their and my time to tell me that they are about to close the office and that i should phone the following day, second line support person was very kind and helpful, but essentially told me that all I could do is save whatever information could be saved or get a Linux machine and try to connect the drive to it, or forget about my date.
Replacement drive is on its way, but I have already lost couple of hours saving information when and if my drive is willing to cooperate (not frequently and not for a long period).
I am still waiting to see what will happen, but feel that I am going to buy another drive as the purpose of the initial purchase was to protect data from being destroyed, and as it is now, I have lost most of it and it is not likely I will be able to save it without a significant cost in time and expenses. Thanks WD for such a wonderful experience!
Interesting that you should worry about data security and then set up the eventual replacement drive in “RAID” 0 mode.
Either way, I’ve got a Pro II sitting on my desk that I’ve had for 3.5 years. It’s an idiosyncratic little thing, I’ll give you that, but it does its job reliably.
Lindsay, the replacement drive had a new purpose, which didn’t require RAID 1. Glad to hear your Pro II has worked fine. I do wish mine had done the same, I didn’t enjoy the whole negative experience. I am glad though that someone from WDC read my plea for help and stepped in to take care of the situation. The Studio II drive has worked great ever since.
Good to hear. I stumbled across your blog again while trying to sort out some issues after migrating to Windows 7. It’s not going so well anymore!
The same issues you mentioned in your original complaint occur on an hourly basis, as opposed to just being (very) occasional. When the drive loses its interface it also takes down most programs that had files on it open. Microsoft finally catching up to Apple I guess.
WD My Book (1 Tera) is total crap …. it’s not working with me at all !!
i dunno why … i plug it in , i put the USB in my laptop , then wait for some electric sounds from that huge box … and then nothing
complete crap !
They most certainly didn’t “get it right” with the Studio 2 edition. I have one that has slowed to the most wretchedly slow speeds I have ever experienced with a drive. It is holding approximately 4 TB of irreplaceable video. I am just praying that data transfers will complete before the drive dies altogether. Neither disk utility, Disk Warrior, or Drive Genius could repair it. The file transfer window says only 96 more hours until the files are completely transferred! Whatever you do, stay away from Western Digital products. Tech support is non-existent once your 30-day installation window is over. Once the product is out of warranty, you are out of luck.
You wrote: “I guess the lesson is that the My Book Pro line had serious faults, and WD got things right with the My Book Studio line. So, if you’re in the market for a drive, DO NOT get a My Book Pro. But DO get a My Book Studio II drive. They work alright.”
Unfortunately, they did not. I own a 2 TB My Book Studio 2 that has just broke and does not hotplug. My laptop is dual-boot with Linux and Vista. In Vista it’s just hopeless: the device appears in the system as “Unknown device”, and no WD program can do anything about it. In Linux I can at least see system log messages such as “usb 2-4: device descriptor read/64, error -110″. I used RAID 0. So, I guess accessing files on the 2 harddrives shouldn’t be a major problem, but I don’t have anything to read the HD’s with…
Tomorrow I’m phoning the customer service guys up. Fingers crossed.
Sorry to hear that. Mine’s worked fine for years.
Fortunately the device is fine again now. Maybe it can live for as long as yours, hopefully! What I did was just resetting the onboard chipset of the enclosure by unplugging it from the power source for the last night.
For people in a hurry, there is also common knowledge that you can reset the device by crossing a jumper J6 on the board inside the enclosure:
http://www.ransackery.com/western-digital-mybook-open-case-recover-data.htm
I’d say the device might have benefited from a large RESET button on the back of the case
Lastly, the problem with My Book was caused by the confused linux bootloader GRUB 2. It seems GRUB hangs if it works when My Book is spinning out its drives. So, connecting it at boot prompt may be costly.