I’m a wedding photographer. that works on a iMac. I’ve been using my MyBook 2TB Studio Edition for the entire wedding season with no issues. The drive was working fine this morning as I was working on photos in Adobe Lightroom (which accesses the photos on the drive)…something I do everyday.
But this evening the drive has been working VERY slow…and Adobe Lightroom is locking up (or spinning indefinitely) when it is accessing the photos on the drive. Seems like it can’t find those photos. And then when I physically look at the drive, the oval light on the front is just blinking…not oscillating up & down like it usually does. I can find any reference to what this blinking might mean. I then restarted my computer and unplugged the drive. Then I started everything back up…and all seems fine (the drive shows up), but then when acessing the drive from the desktop it seems to start spinning again when I start browsing thru the folders and files inside.
I’m happy that everything still seems to be accessible and nothing has disappeared from the drive…but do these problems mean that the drive is failing? Please help.
Yes: It is better safe to start backing up your data to a new place than sorry.
No: Once in awhile, Mac computer needs to shut down or reboot to refresh its system resources. The external device needs to unplug from the computer and power cycle.
Here is what you can do at the mean time is to run the Verify Disk from the Disk Utility.
It will check the condition of the WD external drive.
If it find any bad sectors, run the Repair Disk option.
Note: backup data means have back up in at least couple places, not just one.
Have you tried deleting files till you reach at least 10% free space?
in my case and obviously others as well my Studio went near death as soon as I hit the 95% full limit. From there on the behaviour was unpredictable, but at least generally slow transfers were common. I also contacted the support, but my bet with WD is ******.
The point is, it is reproducible. Fill the drive up, some funny things start happening and it will be crawlingly slow. Make free space, everything is fine again. So I could go for a RMA and have it exchanged, but the problem will persist. With most drives this won’t happen as most users do not fill their drives up, but in this case it is a time machine drive. And those as a matter of fact always fill up sooner or later.
So, as long as WD does not offer a firmware fix, those drives are FUBAR. A possible solution might be to partition them to 90% capacity, but I cannot give a guarantee nor do I want to try it myself.
For you, you might try to delete data and hope (or not hope) that you can reproduce the problem as in my case. If yours does not behave like that, there are plenty of other troubles with the studio drives
