My book studio II failure

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

I have tried firmware updgrade for my studio ii ext drive. The upgrade failed for no reason.Then the drive was unusable on mac. I tried to see the drive on Windows XP maschine.I take the message : unrecogniced device , and the windows upgrade software cant see the drive. 

Please help me…

2

as everyone else around says, don’t try to fix it if it ain’t broke.  since you tried a firmware update, did you completely follow the instructions for doing it?  specifically, turning off all virus and firewalls, and using usb to do the update?  have you tried doing the update on a windows machine?  you were unclear about that.

3

I have an aluminum iMac with OS X Lion and in the last month have experienced a failure of two Western Digital MyBook Studio II drives.  One is a 2 TB configured as Raid 0 for a total of 1TB that is about a year and a half old.  The other is a 4 TB configured as Raid 0 for a total of 2 TB.  Both failures occured after rebooting the iMac (Jan for the 2 TB, Yesterday Feb 3 for the 4 TB drive).  Like others, when trying to connect the drive to another Mac (Macbook Pro), the drives fail to mount automatically.  They also will not mount manually thru the Mac Disk Drive Utility.  The do nt work with either the Firewire 800 or USB connection and when connected to a regular Windows PC, ther drives are not even recognized.

Luckily I have a LeCie 6 TB drive as a backup but only to the 4 TB drive.  I did this after the first drive failed.  This scares the **bleep** out of me since I have a total of four of these drives, the other two connected to other iMacs and the MacBook Pro that are used for Time Machine backups.

(1) Is there anyone else experiencing these failures?

(2) Has anyone resolved or figured out why this is happening?

(3) If this is a chronic problem with these drives, what is Western Digital doing about it?

Obviously, people have spent good money on these drives with the expectation that they are a good drive for backups.  However, like most people, I cannot afford to loose important data and this time around had it not been for the LeCie drive, I would have lost a great deal of information and more than could be backed up to a cloud due to storage limitations.

Any help is appreciated or a chorus of yelling people with the same problems would be welcomed ;-(

4

1- no

2- the unit failed as any other drive could 

3- not that I know of…

next time start your own thread and you’ll get faster assistance 

replace the drives by calling WD

5

Wiser, et. Al: Incorrect on all three counts: (1) yes, many others owning IMacs have had this issue as documented in Apple’s Customer Community (2) The units are 6 months and 2 months old. They did not fail. As state, they did mount to a PC as well as Dismount via USB (3) one of the causes appears to be the Mac OS Lion updates. Fix: Perform an SME Reset according to Apple Directions (This fixed both of my drives) If SME Reset does not work, do a PRAM reset according to Apple’s procedure

1 Like
6

good to know then…

Thanks for sharing the info