My Book Bad; Keeps disconnecting and unrecognized

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi… Not long ago I purchased an external 8TB My Book for my Mac. Up until that point I had used Seagate drives and they have yet to fail me, even after years of use. I directly connected it to my iMac (not via a hub), set up 2 HFS+ partitions and started to load it. It worked for a short time and then one of the partitions would become show nothing on the partition even after transferring GBs of data onto it and it would become unresponsive; it was still showing on the desktop but empty and I couldn’t unmount it.

I contacted WD Support with a lengthy report. My first reply was instructions about a Windows program to run. Clearly they hadn’t even read my report stating it was a Mac (and references to Finder, Disk Utilities, etc.).

My next WD reply from WD was Western Digital does not recommend partitioning WD drives which to me is ludicrous. I have been partitioning drives for decades. I pointed out their own website has instruction on how to partition it.

I was passed along to the next level support. Which wasn’t much help; instructions about unmounting it before unplugging (which I get but of no help). I can’t unmount it when it is unresponsive.

I reluctantly removed one of the partitions, so now a single partition. Still the drive stops responding periodically and the only way I can get it working is unplugging it and plugging it back in. I have the drive set to not sleeping. Even the WD Utility can’t communicate with the drive.

Are most WD external drives this flakey/bad (I have successfully used WD internal drives). I can RMA it but am I likely to have the same issue (Sore point: even though it is faulty I have to pay to ship it back). I was told to keep the USB cable and power adapter. What if the power adapter is faulty?

2

I am having the exact same problem on a Windows 10 PC. Disconnects and the only way to reconnect is to unplug the drive. This is clearly a problem with WD Drives.
Returning to Costco for a refund… Grrrr

3

geraldc, I share your pain.

My guess is the issue is related to case logic board/connectors/power, not the hard drive itself, not that it matters the reason.

Unfortunately I discovered too late that it is not an rare issue; maybe they went cheap on the electronics. I’ve read reports at times the drive looks empty and people reformatted it and started over but if they had unplugged and replugged it in again the files are likely there (they were in my case).

I never found a firmware upgrade available so either they don’t care, the firmware is not upgradeable, or the the design is flawed and the electronics are not fixable.

A shame a company that has been making disk drives for decades can’t manage to make one that just works. Getting a replacement costs you too!!

4

There can be various issues that causes an external drive keeps unmounting/disconnecting on mac:

• The hard drive didn’t plug-in properly
• Data cable is damaged
• USB cable connector got damage
• Hardware or software issue.
• A USB port is damaged

Furthermore, there is a risk of data corruption as well while transferring data between the external drive and Mac. However, to fix the issue, you can try the below fixes:

• Check if your mac is recognizing the drive
• Resolve issue using disk utility
• Change finder settings in your mac
• Recover or backup your drive
• Change the drive’s format

Hope this will help!