Hi.
I have a WD My Passport 750GB, and it became unusable within half a year.
I was transferring some files from it to my PC, and halfway it gave an error message and the transfer stopped.
Then I disconnected the HDD and tried to reconnect, and it won’t be recognized at all anymore, neither the partition that has the HDD software on it nor where the actual files are stored.
It also doesn’t show up in the Smartware software at all anymore.
The problem is not with the cable nor the USB port, I’ve tried various other cables and different USB ports on other machines, the problem is with the drive itself.
The LED still lights up normally when the supplied USB cable is connected, but that’s all.
I’m really disappointed by this product, searching on the web it seems that this is a very common problem. In retrospect I should’ve done this before purchasing, but I always felt WD had a good reputation for HDDs, and the reviews I read before purchasing were generally very positive.
Besides this, the software itself is clunky, and often doesn’t even work. At first, when I got the HDD and tried installing the latest version of the software, it wouldn’t launch at all because it had compatibility problems with the language of my O/S (read: anything other than English).
This is also a common problem with the HDDs, and they even have a part of their FAQ or common troubleshooting devoted to it.
Perhaps it would be more efficient to fix your firmware, rather than making the customer go through loops to get their new product working at all and starting them off with a bad taste.
But after much fiddling and using an older version of the software, I managed to get it to work, but even then every time I plugged in the HDD, it started up with an error message related to this. 0/10 for quality control.
Another common problem with these HDDs is that even the SUPPLIED micro USB cable does not stay in the jack properly, even the lightest amount of movement will unhook it. How did such a major factor ever make it past quality control? Did no one even try to test to see how secure the connection between the jack and the plug was? Again, simply unsightly for such a large company.
I’ve tried searching for solutions online to fix this, and I’ll summarize what I’ve found, and this is basically all you need to know about this HDD once it has failed:
- This product line of external HDDs can break out of nowhere, even if you don’t mistreat it at all, all you have to do is look at it the wrong way. Mine was lying completely still and it just failed out of the blue during a transfer. I treat my electronics very well and rarely have to RMA anything. This HDD was kept in a padded case during travel, and has never been dropped while it was in use, or any other physical abuse at all that could’ve made it fail.
In other words, they break by themselves due to a design fault!
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It’s a problem with the USB connector/PCB board system they use, which is apparently completely rubbish and prone to failure
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When you open up the case, instead of the normal SATA connector you find on regular modern HDDs, there is a proprietary 12 pin connector that no one can access except WD itself. Although even if you could connect it through SATA, you probably still wouldn’t be able to access your data, because it’s passworded.
At this point, it’s not unreasonable to call this a scam. WD sells a shoddy product that has a unbelievably high failure rate. Just google for “WD my passport” and add various keywords such as “broken”, “dead”, “not recognized”, etc, and you will get hundreds of thousands of hits.
And when it’s broken, they will tell you to send it back since there is no way to repair it or retrieve the data yourself due to the proprietary connector. And then they will offer to send you a new one, or have their techs recover the data from it at extortion rates (I’ve read numbers above 1000 USD).
I wouldn’t be surprised if they make more money off “recovering data from failed drives” than actually selling these drives, considering how often they fail.
So why did I write this? I already came to the conclusion that there is no way to fix this, except sending it back to WD for an RMA.
At this point I don’t even want a replacement, even if it was offered to me for free. What good is a HDD that can fail at any moment out of nowhere?
And naturally, I certainly wouldn’t pay a cent for any sort of data recovery.
I wrote this not to find a solution or to be reimbursed, but to warn potential other customers who are considering buying this product, that is all.
P.S: please don’t delete this, else I will repost it on any major hardware forums / news / interest sites, BBB and any other consumer complaint centers I can think of.
I am not trying to slander WD, this is simply the truth about your product, and there are hundreds of thousands pieces of empirical evidence on the internet backing this up, I simply wrote a summary about it to bring attention to it for the sake of protecting the customer.
Even on this very forum itself, there are tons of posts devoted to the buggy software, failing hardware, etc. Honestly, how can you continuing selling this line of products knowing it will self destruct within months, if not weeks, or even days?
Surely any profit made from it can’t weigh up to the damage done to the reputation of the reliability of your products.
Only thing I could ask for is that WD fixes this problem, and will do better QC in the future.
Although personally I will never buy a product from WD again in my life, I do hope that you step up and fix this problem.
I have had WD internal HDDs in my PCs in the past and they served me fine, so I would like to see you overcome this.
The smart thing to do would be to recall this whole line of products, and any other products that may have the same problem, and stop selling them.
And please give a good perusal to whoever gave the green light to put this on the market, something definitely went very wrong there.
Thank you for reading this.
