I’ve had my WD external harddrive for about year, and I’ve lost the box. I looked at the model number on the device itself, but when I looked up that number it didn’t look like the same thing. The closest thing I saw was something that was simply called My Book Essentials. Anyway, if more specific information is needed I can do some more investigating, but I have a feeling somebody is going to simply tell me it’s broken, so I won’t waste my time with that.
Anyway, the thing has been working fine for me going on a year. I only have the thing about halfway full, and it’s mostly with my iTunes library and some photos, plus a few other files. The first trouble I saw out of it was a couple days ago, I had been listening to some music, but when I selected another song I suddenly heard this loud clicking noise coming from the drive. After a few seconds it stopped and the song started playing. But having not liked the sound of it I turned off my machine and unplugged the drive. Thinking it might be going out on me I decided it might be best to leave it alone until I could get something to do a complete backup on.
However the next day I needed to get a file I had saved on it, so I turned off my machine, plugged the drive in, started up the computer, and while I did get a few clicks as it started up, I had no problems with it. I even played the same song that had caused the problem before and didn’t get a sound. So I chalked it up to being a weird quirk, and just left it plugged in, but still planned to back it up. Later on though it started clicking loudly, even though I wasn’t accessing anything off of it. So I shut down and disconnected again. But when I got my stuff together to back it up, I turned it on it’s like it’s not even there. The drive lights up and clicks when it starts up, but other than that it’s just a paperweight. It’s not recognized under my computer, in device manager, or anywhere.
I haven’t made any updates to my computer lately, so nothing has changed since when it worked fine and when it stopped working. I’ve tried connecting it to a different computer, and it wasn’t recognized there either. I’ve used a different USB cable and no dice there either. I’ve read in some discussions that it could be a power issue, that some USB cables don’t give it enough power, but mine has a seperate power supply that plugs into a socket. I’ve read several other things to try, but they seem too involved or potentially dangerous. I don’t want to stick the thing in my freezer, and I don’t know how to take the thing apart and install it into my machine.
I don’t know much about these things, but think there is something other than it being simply broken, or the disc corrupted. It’s getting power and lights up. And I don’t get some message saying the disk cannot be read or it’s corrupt, when I disconnect the USB and put it back in, it’s like I didn’t even do it. There’s not that little sound that denotes a USB device has been plugged in, working or not. I don’t know though, any help would be appreciated. I bought this thing thinking they were pretty sturdy, most of what I have on there isn’t backed up, because I thought that WAS my backup, so I will be losing a lot of stuff there. I know that’s my fault for obviously over-estimating the sturdiness of these things, because while researching my problem it sounds like external harddrives are even more prone to breaking down than computers themselves.
