After installing the newest firmware 1.016 and SmartWare on my ext drive (My Book USB 3.0 with P/N ending in -00), my drive suddenly developed a whole mass of problems. First, I couldn’t access the drive at all and the drive slowed down the shutdown process by a lot (shutdown is much faster if I remove the usb). I reinstalled the firmware and that seemed to help a bit (not sure). If I do a power cycle (removing usb + power from the drive), I can access my data for a short while before the drive freezes and disappears from My Computer (all actions that involve drive access freeze, e.g. I can transfer small bits around 2GB a few times and then the last transfer will hang and I have to disconnect the usb). One change I noticed is that the drive seems much more active when it starts (the white light blinks quickly and more often). When it starts to hang while transferring, I can hear an odd whirring noise. At other times, when I try to forcibly access the data, the drive starts clicking. The only thing I can think of is that I didn’t disable my antivirus the first time I upgraded the firmware (it said the firmware installed successfully).
Does anybody know if it’s the firmware’s problem, or just a normal drive failure?
