WD 4 TB external disconnecting on USB 3.0

[DarrellS]

That's a shame. I was hoping that you'd get it figured out. I just looked at the 4TB USB 3.0 My Book on newegg and although the drive is super cheap st $139.99, most of the reviews are users that can't use their drives at all or have to use them with USB 2.0. There needs to be a major recall on all WD external drives. Surely they know that these drives are junk since they must test them before they put them on the market but they sell them anyway at such a low price that consumers will take them off of their hands and end up making a profit off of defective drives instead of going broke for manufacturing crap drives (and/or enclosures).

ASUS used to be the premier motherboard manufacturer until they started selling defective motherboards. Although they still have a few fan boys, most builders shy away from their boards. WD looks like they are willing to take the same path by making a quick profit at the expense of losing their loyal customers. It's hard to regain someone's trust after you've screwed them over.



Before you give up completely, you might try putting the drives in a cheap enclosure. A few people said they had success with the drives by taking the drive out, reformatting and placing in a different enclosure. For myself, transferring files at 30 MB/s or less (instead of 99 MB/s) would be unbearable which is why I take the drive out and use a SATA connection to transfer files. For playing the files on my 2nd Generation WDTV all I need is the USB 2.0 so I put the drive back in the enclosure to watch movies on my TV.

I guess it's hit and miss which drives work and which drives don't. My friend bought his 1TB My Book (just like mine) a few months after I did and he had no problem with it going to sleep. Sometimes if he had it hooked up, he would have to disconnect it to start Windows 7 and then reconnect it but I don't remember him having the sleep issues. 34% of the users gave the 4TB My Book a good rating and 44% a bad rating. The other 22% were in between.

[hello_hello]

If you're saying that no mechanical drive reaches transfer speeds that they advertise then yeah but I have HD Tune Pro installed and the SATA 3.0 drives connected to the board are slower than the SATA 3.0 drives connected to the controller card and the SATA 6.0 drive connected to the 6.0 controller card is much faster than it is when it's connected to the 3.0 controller. I also use a file transfer software that tells me what speed I am transferring at.

The transfer speed of SATA 1 is 150MB/s, SATA 2 is 300MB/s and SATA 3 is 600MB/s. There might be some drives that can sustain transfers faster than SATA1, but that'd be about it. Anything faster would probably be from MB to the dive's buffer, but not to the platters. What's the difference in sustained transfer speed between the drive connected to SATA 2 and SATA 3?

The MB in this PC has an Intel SATA controller and a JMicron SATA controller. I recall a while back thinking when I connected two drives to this PC via eSATA, one was generally a little faster than the other, and when I tested it, that turned out to be the case (same hard drive), but I had no idea what each drive was connected to until I looked (I couldn't remember). Much to my surprise, the faster eSATA connection on the back of the PC was connected to the JMicron controller. I put the difference down to the Intel controller running in RAID mode and maybe there's extra overhead involved because it has several drives connected to it, or something...... but there's no doubt transferring data between two drives connected to the Intel controller is slower than transferring the same data between a drive connected to the Intel controller and one connected to the JMicron controller. They're both SATA2.

HDTune can report astronomically fast burst rates for some controllers when write-back cache is enabled because RAM is being used as a cache..... or something like that.

I do see your point abut the 4TB drive size, but I was only using that particular size as a price comparison between Green and Black. On the plus side, 4TB drives should generally be faster than their 2TB counterparts, while on the negative side, 4TB is a lot of data to lose when a drive fails. I use the Green drives for external storage so write speed isn't too critical.
So far I've stuck with 2TB drives myself because I'm running XP and because the TV/Bluray player here have a 2TB size limit for their USB inputs, and so far the price per MB for 2TB drives is pretty similar to the higher capacity drives, although no doubt that'll change.