It’s certainly not been a great week for hardware for me. Now the USB 2 Western Digital Elements (1Tb) external drive that I had hooked up to my Linux box quit on me. Appears to be the power brick — disconnecting the enclosure and unplugging/plugging the brick causes the green light to light briefly, then fade away — although I haven’t actually tested the pins to prove that they’re dead and it’s not the enclosure itself. The thing is only about 6 months old; what a crock.
Apparently, the failure for these drives is endemic. See, for instance:
- Comments under the Rusty Lime WD Elements review — lots of folks with the same problem
- A host of complaints at Fixya.com — likewise
- Me-toos on the Whirlpool Forums — and more
The consensus appears to be that WD can’t/won’t replace the power supplies without, at best, a hassle. While Asian Power Devices appears to manufacture a compatible brick, I think I’m just going to go get a new SATA enclosure (or maybe just remount the drive internally) … which is too bad, as I liked the rubber feet on the WD enclosure. Sigh.
Anyhow … given the similar problems others have had, and the minimal opportunities to rectify the problem, I’d stay away from these drives.
my ext.hard usb conector was broken.wat cn i do????!
Hi all! Same problem with my 1TB Elements. Bought it from eBuyer Oct 2008 and in Nov 2009 it stopped spinning up. Green light on power supply flashes for < 1 second then nothing.
Beware of the replacement power supply from DigiDave mentioned by DD above – I believe this has the round (2-pole) connector and not the 5-pin (DIN-type) one.
Called the (free) WD UK Support number (00800 27549338) as a last hope and they’re shipping me a replacement PSU (with the correct 5-pin connector) free of charge!
As already mentioned in a few previous posts, if all else fails you can remove the disk itself from its casing and use it either as an internal hard drive or put it into any USB external enclosure without losing any of the data already on it. Not sure if it’ll be an IDE or SATA disk though…
My WD 1.5 just died . I think it is the power supply. I am going to add it as a internal to my desktop and hope it starts running . It is a SATA connection for those who do not know .
thanks chris d . contacted that support no and a lovely girl called sandy is sending me a new power supply cheers
paul