Bought a 4TB drive on Feb 26th had been working great until yesterday when out of no where it stopped working and my computer wont recognize it anymore. The light is on and I can hear the drive spinning but several computers wont recognize it. I contacted Western Digital and a new was being sent however data recovery is not normally part of the warranty. I called Western Digital back the next day to talk about the data recovery and why this isn't covered on a device that is 2 months old. I spoke to Eunice (A++ service) she talked to her supervisor, because my device is only 2 months old Western Digital stepped up and did the right thing and is allowing me to send the device back to them to have the data recovered and placed onto a new 4TB My passport drive at no charge. It was going to cost me $400-$900 from a 3rd party company if Western Digital did not allow me to send it back to have the data recovered. Thank you for standing behind your product and doing the right thing I will purchase more drives from you in the future because of your actions today. Thank you SO MUCH Eunice from Western Digital and your supervisor your understanding and doing the right thing is much appreciated you now have a loyal customer for life.
Just want to add in a review with the ps4 tag so people can easily see it when they search for "will this work for ps4" and such.
You do not need to do the preformatting as originally described by many. You also should not pay more for the "ps4 version" of this drive. My experience with this was surprisingly smooth and easier than expected. Turned on my ps4, plugged in the hdd, and 2 notifications popped up
-Discover:You can use your external drive as storage
-Unsupported drive format.
If you go onto the discover notification it gave me the option to format it and it was faster than any formatting windows has ever done on a drive especially one of this capacity.
Long story short, ps4 will preformat this for you once you plug it in and confirm it to do so. Once formatting is done it will give you the works about how installing on external storage works and for me it set it as the new default.
Things to keep in mind:
-Only game data is stored on the ext drive.
-Saves, screenshots, videos etc are still on local storage
-Check storage settings to switch between which should be default installation drive.
People buy these hard drives expecting reliability, this disks are made to transport data, not to make lifelasting originals of the most sacred memories. These mechanical discs break, and you can restore your data every time, but you will have to pay for a specialist a lot of money.
Alternatives to these disks: dvd, if you burn a dvd it will be way more reliable than a hard drive, burn many if you need 4tb. Another alternative is 2 or 3 of these disks with copies of your data, if one dies you can buy another and transfer the data and always have 2 or 3 copies.
4tb of your most preciated pictures and videos are worth more than 100bucks, so use one of this options or pay for cloud.
You can check and will find that all these drives have the same score in the reviews and the people complain about the same, people just keep thinking these drives are a safe storage, they couldn't be more wrong.
Having this said, the disks are working great, I'm leaving some pictures.
vote helpful it it was for you
Plugged this into my Xbox One (not the One S) and it automatically asked if I wanted to use it for apps and storage. Once I said "yes", the Xbox handled it perfectly.
This is a great solution for expanding Xbox One storage!!!
I use this for my Xbox one and it works perfectly. The Xbox one comes with limited storage space and I constantly found myself deleting games to make space for more. This portable hard drive was easy to add; just plug it in with the usb. It has tons of storage and I can download as many games as I want. I haven't had any problems yet and I've had this for a while now. It works perfectly and has a reasonable price.
Feature Product
- Auto backup with included WD Backup software
- Password protection with hardware encryption
- Trusted drive built with WD reliability
- USB 3.0 port; USB 2.0 compatible. SYSTEM COMPATIBILITY: Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7. Requires reformatting for Mac OS X operating system
- 3-year manufacturer's limited warranty
Description
My Passport is the trusted, portable storage that perfectly complements your on-the-go lifestyle. Designed to fit in the palm of your hand, there’s plenty of space to store a massive amount of photos, videos, music and documents. Perfectly paired with WD Backup software and password protection, the My Passport drive helps keep your files safe.
Update … after researching on the web, I found an article that indicated one possible option was that the drive security permissions needed to be changed. I went in & found (after 2 tries), that was in fact the problem. So I've changed my rating from a 1 star to 5. I've used WD quite a bit in the past, so to lose a drive that fast was very discouraging.
I would suggest that WD should have been more proactive in sending tips with the drive … as it turns out, I had the same problem a few days later with another WD drive. It would have saved me some time & aggravation. However, to be fair with the vendor, once I got the permissions issue corrected, both drives seem to now work. And while I didn't realize it until I came back online to update this review, the vendor did respond to my "blast" with some helpful suggestions & an invitation to call support. Wish that had been in the box with the drive.
So I'm now changing my rating to a 5 star partially because I feel I blasted WD pretty hard for a fixable problem & partly because I've had several of their drives in the past that were stable.
Less than a week after loading all my files on the drive, I started getting an error message that states "there is a problem with this drive" immediately upon plugging the drive into the USB port. When I tried to access the drive directly via file explorer, I get a message that "Location not available" "drive is not accessible" "access is denied". I also tried plugging it in while the PC was shut down & then powering up … same error message. Finally, I tried to utilize the WD utilities to trouble shoot & got a message that "smart status passed" … also scanned drive & got a message "Passed at Thursday June 14, 2018 8:07:31 PM". Then went back & tried to access the drive, I again get a message that "Location not available" "drive is not accessible" "access is denied".
Now all my personal data is on the drive & I can't delete it, so there's no way I can't safely return the drive to get a refund or replacement. What a waste of time & money. It's too bad because I've used Western Digital drives over the years & only switched because I needed more space. But this experience is so frustrating, that this will be the last WD drive I purchase. I can't afford to throw money away like that after less than a week of use. Looks like my only option is to pursue online back-ups vs. what I hoped was a less expensive option.
This little external hard drive is unbeatable for the price. I had my doubts, but after months of heavy use I can attest to the functionality of this very well designed product. Survived drops, splashed with water, and it's perfectly fine. This HDD has an insane 4TB of space and is so tiny you can easily carry it in your pocket and forget that it's there. The sleek and metallic body has a hefty feel to it despite its slim profile, rubber bottom provides a reliable grip to surfaces. The overall look and feel of this device just screams quality. Affordable, durable, and reliable, the WD 4TB My Passport HDD is quite simply the best bang for your buck when it comes to external hard drives.
I purchased Five WD 4TB Passport drives to back up a WD MyCloudPR4100 24TB (w/ Raid 5) NAS. Unfortunately, the 4TB Passports seem to have a write rate problem. I use a Robocopy batch file with 8 threads running on a windows 10 pro (i5 with 16GB RAM) desktop to back up the MyCloud. I am using a USB3 interface. Backup starts just fine and for the first 2TB, write rates are 80-100 MB/s with an average response time of ~1500 ms. After that, write rates fall precipitously and ultimately drop to 2-3 MB/s with an average response time of 4500-5500 ms by the time the drive has 2.5 TB transferred. After that, the write rate seems to be stuck at a low rate. Disk shows mostly 100% active time.
Things I have tried:
1. Quick format the drive: Write rate remains stuck at 2-3 MB/s
2. Full drive format (takes 12 hours): Write rate is again good for the first 2TB.
3. Halt backup script and just let the drive stay powered up for 8 hours: Partial write rate recovery for a very short time.
4. Switching to performance write (enables cache): no effect as compared to cache disabled.
5. Checking fragmentation: windows says the drive is not fragmented.
6. Altering the back up script to write large files first (PLEX .mkv .mp4 mp3) and then the user files: No difference from writing small user files first.
7. Disable password protection: no difference.
8. Backup directly on the MyCloudPR4100 by defining a backup plan on the MyCloud: still degraded write rate.
9. Used a powered USB3 Hub in case the drive was getting power starved: no difference
10. Disable Anti-virus SW: no difference
11. Run CHKDSK: no errors found
12. Change default allocation unit to from 4k to 32k: No difference
There is no way to disable windows write caching on the WD Passport.
I have already returned one drive to Amazon, but the replacement drive has the same characteristics. In fact, all of my 4TB drives have the same issue.
It is interesting to note that I have a 3.5 inch 3T WD MyBook and a 3.5 inch 3TB Seagate Backup Plus both with external power and usb3 and neither seem to have the problem.
Since write rate does not reset to near 100MB/s unless a full format is done on the drive (quick format does not help at all), and the problem has duplicated itself on 5 of 5 drives that I purchased, I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with the 4TB Drive.
WD, Fix your drives!
March 11, 2018
I edited this review on Feb 26, 2018, but the update was not posted. I have reposted my update.
UPDATE Feb 26, 2018
I have completed a much further examination of the 5 4TB Passport Drive I still have.
WD suggested using their disk tools to validate the drives are good. All 5 drives passed all tests when using the WD Data Lifeguard tool. When I attempted to erase the drives with the tool, the erase failed.
I then used the WD drive utilities to rerun diagnostics (all passed) and then the tool was used to erase the drives. From the messages that pop up on WD, it appears that the erase/wipe tool deletes the partition and then creates and formats a new partition.
After using the WD drive utilities to wipe the drives, I reran my drive performance check which was composed of transferring 2.7 TB (185k files)from my MyCloudPR4100 via my 1Gb/s LAN to a Dell Latitude 3470 laptop with the drive plugged into a USB 3 input. The transfer was done using a .bat robocopy with 16 threads and no directory or file listing. Files were mkv, mp3, and misc (mostly jpg). The laptop had no other activity running. The WD MyCloudPR4100 was connected to a Netgear ProSAFE GS108 gigabit switch which was also connected to the Dell Latitude 3470.
Drives were set to use the default profile (safe removal, no caching) and indexing of file contents was disabled.
The windows performance monitor was used to log the write performance of the drive each minute.
All 5 drives were tested and the results are summarized in the attached .jpg. Initially, write performance on the mkv files was approximately 70GB/s and degraded slowly as seen in the attached graphic. mp3 and jpg write performance was approximately 43 MB/s.
As a further test, I erased the 522GB of the "mostly jpg" workload and then proceeded to write 924GB of mp4 files to the drive. Write performance was 27-34 MB/s.
I should note, the MyCloudPR4100 is used as a Plex server and is also used as DVR storage and backup for PCs on the network, so some occasional performance degradations could be attributed to other network or server traffic.
So in conclusion, I have upgraded my rating from a 1 to a 4. WD did not get the 5 rating because of my out of the box experience noted above on all 5 drives. The is no reason I should need to use the WD tools prior to using each drive. They should work well from the factory.
Mac users! Don't go straight into Mac's Disk Utility just yet. Avoid major error by running WD apps first.
1. Plug in and open the Hard drive; install the Mac driver/software (inside) and "WD Drive Utilities"; it will prompt for latest updates--run updates. 2. Now run WD Drive Utilities app to Erase--must select "HFS+J" which is Mac Journaled. 3. Finally, it is now a Mac External HD. You can start using it, or run Mac Disk Utility if you like. *I ran Disk Utility after I did it all that to make sure I don't run into future issues. :)
I have owned probably over 15 WD drives over the years and while they aren't without occasional issues, I seemed to have far more success with them opposed to Seagate.
Since I have been filling my other drives up and don't have anymore power outlets for My Books to plug in I decided to go with the 4TB Passport. The passports are smaller, don't require a separate power source, and with USB 3 they transfer very quickly.
Everything has gone smooth so far and I've transferred about 200GB quickly and without issue. I have to say, for the price/GB these drives are great and I can easily recommend them.
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