A few years ago, I bought a 500 GB external USB drive called a “My Book – Essential Edition” made by Western Digital to store my personal data on…. you know, as a backup of stuff on my computers.
….well, about a year after using it, the hard drive inside it failed…. and I mean the old “grinding disk clicking noise of death” failure. Numerous systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) couldn’t even tell there was a disk present when it was plugged in. Data Recovery software could also not find a drive…. so I bought a newer, more “advanced” version.
The 500 GB “My Book – Pro Edition”…. one specially made for use with Mac’s…. thinking it would be better….
WRONG!!!
For the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing a problem with the external drive ceasing to be recognized by my Mac Mini. I have been using it to store our MP3’s and other media for use with our iTunes & AppleTV.
…it’s worked fine as that for at least a year or more. Now, it’s starting down a path that I fear could lead to another disk failure.
I started getting errors on the AppleTV saying that it couldn’t play whatever files because it couldn’t recognize the format…. it would even stop playing in the middle of a song/movie because of the issue as well. When I looked at the Mac Mini, I found that iTunes had stopped “responding” to anything and that I couldn’t browse to the external My Book either. The Console would show tons of “Disk I/O Errors” for the stupid thing.
Only when I unplugged the My Book did the Mac return to a normal operation state and iTunes functioned again. However, since all the media was on the My Book, I’d have to shut down the Mac, unplug the power to the My Book, plug it back into the Mac, then power both items on…. and even then, the Mac would only recognize the external drive 80% of the time.
So rather than risk losing everything, I decided to just copy it all to another drive. Well, it turns out it wouldn’t be THAT easy…. the My Book would act up a few minutes into transferring data and I’d have to repeat the whole unplug process all over again.
Thinking that an OS upgrade may help, I upgraded the Mini to OS X Leopard….. but that didn’t help.
After a bit of Internet searching, I found varying accounts of similar stories… but nothing the same. A key point that many of the stories had in common was the mention of a bad power source for the My Book. So…. I removed the hard drive from the My Book enclosure and plugged it directly to the Mac Mini via SATA-to-USB cable.
So far, so good…. it’s transferring data to the other drive without issue and has already lasted 3 times longer than it did when it was inside the My Book enclosure.
I’ve learned my lesson… sorry WD, but I will NEVER recommend or buy another external drive system made by your company again. Your internal drives have never given me an issue in the past, but the external ones? … never again.
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