Congratulations to WD for finding a whole new way to make hard drives wrong

[Mercutio]

Someone brought me a WD "My Passport" 500GB 2.5" USB hard drive today. It's not working, or at least not well enough to take any data off of it, and its owner says there's important stuff on the drive.

OK fine.

SOP for something like this is to pull the drive out of the enclosure and plug it into a SATA port, right?

Not this time.

This drive, marked as a WD5000BMVV-11GNWS0, has a native micro-USB port. No SATA, no nothing. I've never seen anything like it.

I'd ask what the hell they were thinking when they made these drives, but to be honest I don't know or care about the answer.

 

[MaxBurn]

Makes sense to me, big reduction in part and production costs if you do that. Blame the consumers.

 

[MaxBurn]

This guy seems to be taking it to the next level.
http://new.gameru.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t43044.html

 

[Mercutio]

Makes sense to me, big reduction in part and production costs if you do that. Blame the consumers.

I can almost sort of squint and see that, but why take the effort to make the different PCB in the first place?

 

[Adcadet]

If these are meant as external drives, what's the big deal just going from the drive to a USB interface rather than from the drive to SATA to USB? I know it sucks to not have a SATA interface on the drive for situations like this, but what small percent of external drives would ever get removed from their enclosure and plugged into a SATA port? Are micro-USB ports very prone to failure? I'd think this setup would provide for one less part to fail, right?

 

[Mercutio]

If these are meant as external drives, what's the big deal just going from the drive to a USB interface rather than from the drive to SATA to USB? I know it sucks to not have a SATA interface on the drive for situations like this.

Because situations like this come up all the goddamned time and computers are notorious for providing USB ports that operate at something other than the expected standard; either they don't work at full speed or they don't provide power like they're supposed to.

 

[LunarMist]

It has been that way for over a year, since around the time that micro USB replaced mini USB in WD Passports. IIRC I mentioned it in a thread some time ago. In fact it is surprising that did not occur long ago as the price of a single board must be less than adding the separate bridge board. I can only speculate that drive manufacturers wanted to keep their internal vs. external suplly ratio more flexible.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Someone brought me a WD "My Passport" 500GB 2.5" USB hard drive today. It's not working, or at least not well enough to take any data off of it, and its owner says there's important stuff on the drive.

OK fine.

SOP for something like this is to pull the drive out of the enclosure and plug it into a SATA port, right?

Not this time.

This drive, marked as a WD5000BMVV-11GNWS0, has a native micro-USB port. No SATA, no nothing. I've never seen anything like it.

I'd ask what the hell they were thinking when they made these drives, but to be honest I don't know or care about the answer.

I imagine this is to screw people buying external drives on the cheap and taking them out to use as internal drives.

 

[Sol]

I imagine this is to screw people buying external drives on the cheap and taking them out to use as internal drives.

A small percentage of the market buy an external hard drive based on speed, reliability and the manufacturers reputation. Everyone else gets the largest capacity drive for the lowest price and those being equal gets the physically smallest package. Taking out bits most people are never even going to know where there helps make the device both smaller and cheaper. No anti-consumer plot is required to explain this one, it seems like a pretty sound business decision.

 

[Mercutio]

Unfortunately, it's also removing a kind of useful troubleshooting tool, since SATA ports always work the same way and USB ports don't.

 

[Sol]

I don't think anyone here would dispute that it's kind of annoying... Just that it's any sort of mystery.

 

[Mercutio]

The mystery is how one company can be so wrong about so many things and yet continue to operate as a business.

This statement also applies to Apple, Adobe (the person I know who works there was laid off today in advance of end-of-quarter), Symantec, nVidia and S*ny as well.

 

[MaxBurn]

They lowered their production costs and passed savings along to consumers, nothing wrong with that and 99% of the consumers like it that way.

 

[Mercutio]

They made drives that are unreasonably incompatible with other drives. That's not an improvement.

 

[MaxBurn]

Congratulations, you are the 1%.

[size=-3]In this case[/size]

 

[LunarMist]

The portabale USB-powered drives are not designed to be user serviceable, so the fact that the drives cannot be reused is an inconvenience you must accept. In the days of the 320-640GB drives I pulled quite a number of them from WD Passports, Toshiba Canvios, etc. for use as internal drives. I don't enjoy losing that option either, but it's not a reason not to buy an external drive.

 

[Mercutio]

It's absolutely a reason not to buy a drive. Drives that can't be plugged in to a proper disk interface can only be described as defective.

 

[LunarMist]

Well, one can buy a drive and enclosure if one is willing to spend more and live with the bulk. I like the smaller size/lower weight of the integrated external drives. They also usually have better shock absorption than the enclosures purchased separately.

Aren't the Seagate externals the same?

 

[Mercutio]

I have no idea. I buy drives and stick them in enclosures myself. But in any case it's just another in a long line of insults to the consumer.

 

[LunarMist]

Oh yeah, the consumer is completely screwed from birth to death, and worse very year. I'm trying to select a cheap cremation/funeral deal, so they don't try to screw my ancestors. The problem is they can bankrupt first and you get screwed alive.