WD Elements melt-down. The Return of the Geek!

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

Hi there. Sorry to ask and thank you in advance for advice. But this is way beyond my technical level.

  1. I had an Elements Itb drive. Someone I cannot name fell over the wire. It hit the deck and broke the connector to the board.
  2. Removed 1tb drive. A friend switches it to an old My Book Essential enclosure. But the drive and time machine keeps dropping out. Then eventually disappears for good. Lost all my backups.
  3. So I then buy a new WD Red. Put that in this My Book enclosure. Drive appears but time machine fails.
  4. My thinking now is My Book enclosure is either old firmware or damaged. And perhaps old and new drive are OK.
  5. So perhaps firmware on the My Book enclosure needs to be updated. Download Firmware updater 3.2.4. But cannot get it to see the drive at all.
  6. The serial of the My Book is WD3200C032-032. Is there an older updater I need? Is there any other route to success (IE how can I test this enclosure?)
  7. I’m on a macbook pro 2016 and El Capitan.
  8. Thank you in advance. You are all Tech Gods…!
  9. Incidentally I formatted drive using Disk Utility. And I know there is a known issue with Time Machine (Never had that before on WD drives I bought). I formatted the drive correctly using GUID map. and HFS+
2

The My Book enclosure was not designed to take another drive from the one that was originally installed within it. A firmware update will not resolve this. My suggestion would be to purchase a third party drive enclosure and put the drive inside that.

3

Timothy - thank you sir. Utterly superb. I have to show my ignorance, but would you know where I could buy such an item. And what do I have to worry about when purchasing it? Sorry to be so unbelievably thick! Best. P

4

Hey Tim. Sorry to ask one additional question. I love WD drives and have a bunch of them. If this fails and thus I have 2 faulty drives and I buy a new WD drive for backup. Can you suggest a model. I normally use the Elements drive. Because it has powered backup and unless you drop them they are superb. But I do not understand the difference between the Elements series and the My book series. If you happen to know… thanks again fella.

5

Any electronics store would sell drive enclosures, even Staples. People choose the Elements drives because they do not want drive encryption or password protection. They are basically “bit boxes” with no software included. Any drive would work in place of the Elements drive, then main thing would be usability (portable or desktop) and capacity. I doubt the drives you have now are bad. Once you install either of them in the enclosure, just make sure you format it for how you want to use it. For Mac, you have a choice of HFS+ which is the Mac default, at least until High Sierra comes out and then it will be AFPS, or EXFat, which is a cross platform format so you can use the drive on both Mac and Windows at the same time.

Instructions to Format a Drive for Use with Windows or macOS

6

Tim - thank you. Superb.

7

Sorry Tim. Final, final question. The original elements drive. From which I rescued the hard drive. If I was trying to see if I could still get data from that. And baring in mind the original elements enclosure is broken. Is there any chance that I can put that drive in a third party enclosure and get it to work. What would you guys advise. (I know it’s a long shot but it is a couple of years of backups). Thanks P

8

Yes, as I said earlier, the Elements drive has no encryption so you will be able to put the drive in an enclosure and get the data from the drive. Just make sure you do not format it. If the drive cannot be accessed, this could be a result of the dropping of the drive that caused the original enclosure to break.

9

Thanks again. Tim. I’m off shopping! Best P