In April I purchased the My Book Essential 3tb for use as a backup and to store all of our photographs for my wife’s photography business. Several weeks ago the drive just quit working. It seems to be the case with these things. It is the same problem over and over that I keep reading. Tech support runs through the checklist and offers to send a USB cord. After eight days it shows up. The drive still does not work! It spins up fine, that hasn’t been the problem. There is plenty of power going to the unit. After a system restore the drive was detected for a few minutes and it quickly vanished again. The drive has been connected to five, yes five (5) different computers to verify that there is not a computer problem with our primary system. My wife is in the beginng stages of her photography career and has clients waiting on photos. Since there has been no photos provided, payment has not been provided. The point with that is, we do not have $500 or $1,500 to senf this drive off to be salvaged. My question is, if everyone on here posts similar issues and WD knows about these issues, why are we only getting a complimentary USB cord? This is bad business! Many recovery services and technicians I have spoken to have all stated that WD has gone downhill over the years and these problems continue. I have voided the warranty which doesn’t cover file recovery, naturally, by taking it our of the case and connecting it directly to the mother board. It still doesn’t work! We have over 150 hours of editing and $2,000 worth of photos on this drive that we have absolutely no way of retrieving without using my mortgage payment to send it off. I am upset! My wife is stressed! We have limited income and WD just continues to tell us it’s not their problem. I want my files back! All updates have been completed, no change! Has anyone been fortunate enough to find a cost effective solution? Recovery software does not work since the drive is not recognized on anything. If I didn’t mention, it spins, without clicking. Can someone please help? We have everything invested in this business and we cannot afford for it to fall flat before we get on solid ground, simply because a manufacturer does not care about it’s customers. Take care of your customer, spend a little profit to fix your equipment and help me and these other people. I promise you, if you do that you’ll see many kudos and possibly increased revenues from being the company with a customer oriented reputation.
If the drive doesn’t show up in BIOS when connected directly to your motherboard, then there’s probably nothing you could do as an end user. 
Actually, fzabkar, may have a point. When you plug it into your motherboard, does it show up in Device Management? Also, what operating system are you using? Cause XP won’t be able to recognize a 3 TB drive. And you may do damage to the drive by connecting it to an XP machine. However, if you’re connecting the drive to Vista or 7, and If the drive shows up in device management, then it’s possible that the issue may be with the external case.
One other question I have. When you put the drive back in the case and connect it the the computer, does the drive show up in Disk Management? If so, then it’s possible that you corrupted the file system.
[edit]
I also forgot the drive you’re using is a smartware drive. If you take it out of the external case, you won’t be able to read it on your computer anyway. It is a hardware encrypted drive. It needs the case to be read. When you respond, we can go from there.
Hey, I am on a Vista OS. Unfortunately, I did not realize when I bought the drive that the encryption stated in the description meant, there is only one way in and one way out without my control. I assumed it was a setup thing. I was going to attempt to use a docking station, or new external closure, but again, the use of those is impossible without the USB board, right? I have run several recovery programs on the main drive and have been able to retrieve a few client photos, but most are already overwritten. It is funny how I have been hearing more and more from vendors lately about the poor quality of WD drives lately. I wish they would have told me that before I handed them $200. Anyway, Do you have any other advice or am I flat on my face? It does not register in disk management when I plug it back in. Let me take that back, it registers about every 65th time I plug it in. It loads the driver and says it’s ready, BUT, I actually took the USB board off and just plugged it in and of course, the driver was recognized. It only held for about a minute or so though. I put it back on the drive and plugged back in and, nothing. I have update all drivers, software, Microsoft, adobe, everything I can think of. The drive doesn’t click, it sounds fine when it spins up. I use malware bytes, and Norton 360 on my computer and perform regular scans. My defrag is scheduled to run once every two weeks due to the massive amount of data being stored and moved around. Like I said, this was an over the night kind of deal. ??? Just bought a new drive and it comes with a two year relpacement/recovery warranty. Trying to figure out why WD will not offer this, especially if they know they have issues. I’m thinking the encryption thing could be stressed a little bit more or not sold in everyday stores where less computer savvy folks go to purchase these things.
Many users are reporting physical connection problems with the micro-USB connectors on WD’s external drives. Could it be as simple as that?
BTW, even if the data were not encrypted, you would still have trouble accessing it directly via a SATA port on your motherboard. This is because the USB-SATA bridge board in the enclosure reports to the OS that the external device uses 4KB LBAs. This means that the external file system (NTFS) was partitioned and formatted on the basis that the sector size is 4096 bytes rather than 512. Therefore the partition table in sector 0 points to LBA 7 (?) as the location of the boot sector for the first partition instead of the usual sector 63. In reality, 4KB LBA 7 is 512-byte LBA 56 as far as the drive is concerned.
When you connect the drive to a SATA port, it reports to the OS that it has an LBA size of 512 bytes. Therefore, when your OS examines the partition table, it expects to find the starting location of partition #1at LBA 7 instead of LBA 56 where it actually is. I hope that made sense. 
See these discussions (one is about a competitor’s 3TB external HDD):
hphotography wrote:
Hey, I am on a Vista OS. Unfortunately, I did not realize when I bought the drive that the encryption stated in the description meant, there is only one way in and one way out without my control. I assumed it was a setup thing. I was going to attempt to use a docking station, or new external closure, but again, the use of those is impossible without the USB board, right? I have run several recovery programs on the main drive and have been able to retrieve a few client photos, but most are already overwritten. It is funny how I have been hearing more and more from vendors lately about the poor quality of WD drives lately. I wish they would have told me that before I handed them $200. Anyway, Do you have any other advice or am I flat on my face? It does not register in disk management when I plug it back in. Let me take that back, it registers about every 65th time I plug it in. It loads the driver and says it’s ready, BUT, I actually took the USB board off and just plugged it in and of course, the driver was recognized. It only held for about a minute or so though. I put it back on the drive and plugged back in and, nothing. I have update all drivers, software, Microsoft, adobe, everything I can think of. The drive doesn’t click, it sounds fine when it spins up. I use malware bytes, and Norton 360 on my computer and perform regular scans. My defrag is scheduled to run once every two weeks due to the massive amount of data being stored and moved around. Like I said, this was an over the night kind of deal. ??? Just bought a new drive and it comes with a two year relpacement/recovery warranty. Trying to figure out why WD will not offer this, especially if they know they have issues. I’m thinking the encryption thing could be stressed a little bit more or not sold in everyday stores where less computer savvy folks go to purchase these things.
Wow. You’re all over the place. I’m having a hard time making sense of what you’re saying. Okay. First off, did you check to see if the drive shows up in Disk Management? Look there first. Tell us what it shows if anything.
Next, you need to slow down. With all that it seems like you’re trying to do, you could be doing more damage to your data.
Also, are you using the cable that came with that drive? If so, try using another cable. And, finally, is the USB port on the drive loose, or snug?
