WD My Books keep failing on MBP and iMac

RJenkins81 wrote:

I bought two 6TB My Book WD external hard drives less than a month ago to back up pictures and videos from other older 4TB WD External HD.

Just a personal observation: I have often found external WD (Western Digital) drives fail within a year so tend to avoid them.

The first one failed on me yesterday, where it was plugged into my MacBook Pro (M1) and the computer just went to a pink screen, shut down, and restarted all on its own. Then it no longer recognized the WD HD 😭.

This sounds like an issue with the Mac itself (although I note from further down that you used an iMac too ...

Today, in a panic, I wanted to back up the same stuff because I am going to lose my mind if I lose all of these precious memories of my kids, but this time I decided to use the 2020 iMac in case it was an issue with the laptop. Well, what do you know… another random shut down and same problem - now it’s not recognizable!

Crazy! Are you actually seeing a message saying that the drive is not recognisable? Or is it just not appearing on the desktop?

On Mother’s Day of all days!

Oh no!

I had successfully copied most of the data also to both. It works well and is promising and then bloop - Mac failure. I am livid. The one is now plugged into my husband’s old Microsoft Surface and not sure if it can repair it but it is trying (and disk utility didn’t work on either). I am hoping for a miracle but to say I am disappointed in Apple at this point is a huge understatement. I have had macs for years and external hard drives for years. This has never happened. What is going on?

To clarify: are you saying most of your photos are on both 6TB drives but are just not accessible?

What can I do so I don’t lose precious memories? I have also been uploading to the cloud but with my slow upload speeds it’s not happening nearly as fast as I would like. Please help me! Thank you!

Are you dragging and dropping your photos? Or using Time Machine (I would recommend Time Machine)

What format you use when formatting the drives? MacOS Extended? APFS? Something else?

I have to agree, WD drives in general are considered a low quality enclosure. I would swap them out and buy a higher quality External Hard Disk, something like the OWC Mercury Elite Pro which is what many experienced users on these forums like due to their extremely high quality enclosures, reasonable price and great support from the vendor.