applepie1951 wrote:
This topic has been here before regarding the same company drives (Western Digital) and I voiced my experience with WD then, I pray that some listened. As I said before I had the exact same thing happen to me, and I lost over 3,000.00 photos that I did not have a backup of, and after weeks of trying everything and even calling data recovery company only to be told that to recover what was on the drive would cost me thousands of dollars, I just faced the fact that I had lost those pictures, but what I did learn from that experience was even after you eject the disk make sure the light on the drive goes off indicating it has stop spinning before you unplug it, are to just shut down the computer before you unplug it and most importantly as far as I’m concerned, never buy are use WD drives, since my experience which was about 4 years ago I have never used WD external drives again, I now use LaCie and SanDisk SSD, all the problems I ever hear of drives failing has been with WD drives and in the last 4 years I have heard of a LOT, even friends of mine that owned them have had problems with them, you can try every data recovery software that’s out there but I doubt if any of them will work for your problem, so unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money to pay a data recovery company sorry to say you’re out of luck, my advice once you get over the hurt, never use WD drives again, I would not use a WD drive again even if someone gave it to me for free......Good Luck
This topic has been here before regarding the same... (
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Actually WD does make some very good drives, especially since they bought HGST, it just depends on the model. The fact is that over the years, WD and Seagate have bought up almost their competitors, so if you’ve heard of HD failure, the odds are at least 50%, it’s a WD or one of their owned companies. It all depends on where the drive was manufactured and the model. All the companies have manufacturing operations in multiple countries, and a specific plant may have a very good or a very bad reliability record, which can change dramatically over time and with the model being manufactured. For example, the LaCie, which you endorse (and is now owned by Seagate), has produced some of the worst and least reliable drives ever made, while WD’s enterprise class drives (such as the HGST UltraStar) are as good as any spinning disks made. That said, WD, like many others, does not specify which of their drive models they use in a given external, but you can bet it’s one of their cheapest drive. As I’ve stated many times, you cannot manufacture, QC, market and sell at a reasonable retail profit, a quality external drive for <$100, and investing in them is, in my opinion a waste of money and dangerous. if you want a quality external, buy an enterprise class drive (such as the HGST Ultrastar I mentioned earlier) a fan cooled case, and put the two together yourself.
Either way, the era of the spinning disk is slowly coming to an end. SSDs are at least as reliable, the speed is orders of magnitude higher, and the cost/TB is dropping by roughly half and the capacities doubling every year. I recently replaced an Intel SSD deployed in 2012 with. New larger NVME m.2 drive on an NVME to PCIe adapter, not because the intel had failed, but because it was full - I still keep it online. BTW, that new drive (a Samsung 970) benchmarks right at 3,000 MB/sec (!).
Now to the OP’s issue. It’s likely that the file system or allocation table/MBR is corrupted, but not certain. A write operation may have been interrupted, causing the corruption, or ot may have been a power glitch caused by unplugging the drive. If it’s FS corruption, the drive can probably be saved, but not necessarily the contents. If the OP has a drive repair and diagnostic ap, now is the time to run it. Question(s): is the drive visible in disk management (assuming this is a Windows machine)? If not, and it is USB connected, have you tried unplugging the USB cable and replugging it? When you do, does Windows recognize a new device and if so, does it then show up in disk manager? Btw, wouldn’t hurt to try a new USB cable and port just on principle - coincidences do happen. If you can see the drive, and are familiar with the command line, get to a command line, either from run>cmd or from powershell and execute a chkdsk command with the /r (repair) extension, and depending on the result, you may want to execute an MBR repair command. Report back to us your progress (or lack thereof) and one of the many experienced admins in the forum will try to help.