I bought a MyBook 2TB External back in Nov 2014 and been using it on my Xbox One but I would turn on my Xbox and notice that the external wouldn’t be noticed anymore. I struggled with this for a week and eventually said “okay, let’s just see if it works on PC. Maybe the Xbox software is messed up” but now I noticed that it’s doing the same thing on my Windows 10 Desktop. It just stops working and I have to unplug it and plug it back in for it to work.
I had a 1TB Seagate which uses the same kind of cable so I switched to that cable and it is STILL happening.
Can anyone help me? Surely the drive isn’t dying after this short amount of time.
Hi @komentra
I’m sorry to hear you are having trouble with your My Book. Hard drives lifespans vary based on a large number of factors and it would be impossible for me to know if 3 years was a short amount of time without knowing how heavily it’s been in use, what kind of environment it’s in, and lots of other information.
According to a quick Google search, a recent study showed that ~80% of drives (from any manufacturer) survived 4 years, although I don’t know how accurate that data is or how comprehensive or scientific this study was.
Regarding your actual issue… the first thing I would do is make sure the data is backed up to another location. If the drive is failing, you don’t want to have to take the drive to a data recovery company if you don’t have to.
Once you have a second copy of your data, I’d try wiping the drive and doing a fresh format. While this doesn’t scream “formatting issue” to me, this can correct a lot of issues including problems with flags on the partition.
If the issue continues to occur after the format, let us know here on the Community and hopefully someone can provide some more sophisticated advise. You might also want to contact our Technical Support team as they know our products inside and out and may have some additional solutions someone here may not think of.
