I own 5 Western Digital MyBook Essentials 1Tb external drives - bought for their size, stackability and price rather than speed. When doing a massive file transfer between two of the drives, left to run overnight, one of the drives died on me. Trying a different power supply, USB cable and computer yielded no results.
Luckily this drive was 95% backed up on another - so I of course decided to copy the drive that now had the only copy of files on it to my home server as a backup. You know what happened next - left to copy the 800Gb or so of files overnight I checked in the morning only to find another dead drive that could not be revived.
I'd gotten ready to RMA the first drive but did not want to send the second because that would have meant total data loss. Biting the bullet and killing the warranty (did I mention these drives were 5 and 4 months old respectively) I cracked the case on the second one to see whether it was the controller or drive that had died.
My server detected the drive immediately and mounted it for use! PHEW!
Googling the issue revealed a number of people that experienced similar dead drive issues. COME ON WD! Fix the controllers you are putting into the drives!
So, if you have a similar drive and really need the data on it slide a really thin screwdriver into the gap in the case and slowly work it around. There are clips on the outside of the case that go under the inside part - when you get to one of these slowly push it down and it won't break. Remove the screws carefully and wiggle the controller card a little to get it off - do not force it, it is directly plugged into the drive!
Only question now is whether to crack the first drive as well - I suspect this is a controller batch failure so returning the drive might get you a better one and some more warranty however if you open it you could have a working 1Tb drive albeit no warranty.
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Jesus.
ReplyDeleteI have a Tb WD MyBook, which I used to RAID 1. But 500G wasn't cutting it so ended up using the entire Tb. Interestingly, my model is unable to handle RAID 0, but given the issue was capacity not speed, like bratwurst - whatever. Now have the WD backing up to a Tb Time Machine.
I've read lots of bad shit about WD drives....there was an issue not so long ago where if you mounted a WD drive externally on a mac, you couldn't burn any dvds or cds - the WD daemon fucked with the control of the optical drive via a plist file (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6431169�) ... took Western Digital atleast a year to respond and fix the problem with updated drivers...so let's not hold our collective breaths re: this controller problem.
Cheers for the tip.