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It's my secondary backup. Once a week I plug it in and backup my primary backup.
But if it's only going to last 1 year of minimal usage it is definitely not worth buying. And it's dead already.
So it only gets used 4-6 hours per week at most. It worked fine for the time that it did run.
I've had this hard drive for barely 1 year. 95% of the time it isn't even on.
The power light comes on but all I hear is a faint high pitched beep and the drive itself does not spin up.
I looked more carefully, and apparently the surface-mount inductor solder joint had opened. I hope this saves somebody from losing data or throwing away a perfectly good hard drive. So I resoldered it down, and voila, it worked perfectly again.I think this could be the source of many complaints people have about WD My Book drives failing in high-use applications. With the 12V power attached, there was no voltage appearing across the 1000uF cap (C55), so I assumed the 12V to 5V DC-DC (switching) converter circuit was not working. If you know your bare drive is good, look carefully at the FIREFLY 1U/1B board and test for continuity between both ends of the inductor and the + terminal of the 1000uF output cap (C55).
Mine says FIREFLY 1U/1B in the upper right on the component side. Then I happened to test the voltage at the output of the inductor (L19) and I was getting 4.X volts. If the inductor is not connected at one end to the output capacitor, things aren't going to work. Or, better yet, check for continuity between pin 8 (SW) of U4 (the NX2114 controller chip) and the + terminal of the output cap. My out-of-warranty WD My Book Essential II USB 2.0 drive (MDL: WD5000H1U-00) stopped powering on recently, and after testing the wall wart output and trying a different USB cable & computer, I opened the enclosure and tried the bare drive in another enclosure, and it worked fine.So I started testing the I/O / power supply PCB (I am an electrical engineer).
Nothing looks scorched, swollen, or out of the ordinary physically. The more time the drive is powered on, the more vibration the surface-mount inductor will experience (mostly from the drive mechanism but also from its self-induced switching vibration), and the more likely the solder joint will fail.
Durability is amazing. My WB book suffered some major outside damage during the recent earthquake in Haiti but I did not lose one single byte of data.
Having some trouble with hard drive not being able to disconnect but overall its a great product.
By lifting mine while defragging, it caused Windows Defragmenter to crash, which is the first time in 16 years' of computer ownership I've seen that happen.Did I mention S-L-O-W. What kind of reliability are we talking about, when someone who likes the drive doesn't even trust it. Not just slow to write through the USB bus, but slow to format, slow to defrag, slow to SHRED critical data with DOD Delete. Really, I wonder whether I got one of the USB 2.0 ones, or if this is an older model 1.0. Bought it about a year ago and have kept it in my fire safe to have a worst-case safe copy if the rest of the place goes up. Some have been in continuous service since 2003.But this outboard "My Book" seems to be a completely different creature.For one thing it's agonizingly slow. And a not-so-happy owner of one of these.
To do so risks your data. My two SATA WD's are 300 GB drives and must be 8 times faster to defrag or reformat. Not even in the same league, not even in the same city as this external drive. It does not have a power switch, which indicates the newer model, and has the two vertical blue strip LED's, so I guess it is one of the newer ones. What's that tell you. At least it hasn't completely pooped out (yet). Wondering now whether this was a good choice.If I had to do it over again, I would have obtained a firewire external box and placed an OEM Western Digital drive in it.
:-)OK so here's my Big Tip Of The Day: Do not move this drive around while it is writing.
The ones I really like are the internal drives, have 3 PATA and two SATA WD's and those have been real champs, with no failures at all over all this time.
Here's how slow that is: I set up this 750G My Book to SHRED the 400G igs of empty space on the drive (overwriting empty space with just one pass of zero's) and went to bed.
Do not move it at all, don't tilt it, bump, lift or anything.
Or just keep shopping.
For the moderately "tekkie" inclined, that would be the way to go.
I am a very happy owner of several WD hard drives.
7 hours later, it wasn't even 1/4 done.The other thing that makes me nervous about this drive is all of the "It died" comments and even the positive reviewer who advised to backup the backup.
This is the pee-wee league here.
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