Can you use a Western Digital My Passport through the USB adapter?

This is a bit confusing, but I want to include all background info incase it's relevant. There is a TL;DR though!

1. I had a Western Digital My Passport hard drive which worked great for the past 4 years or so. I mostly used it to hold my Photos libraries once they got full. In September, I tried to access it and it did not show up on my computer at all(a mid-2010 Macbook Pro; updated to the newest software to that date)--the light on the hard drive would blink and I could hear the disks spinning but it didn't even pop up as unreadable.
2. Late December I brought the hard drive to Best Buy, where they could not figure out the issue but went ahead and transferred the data to a new hard drive, WD Passport.
3. The same week, I got a new computer, a 12-inch Macbook.
4. The new hard drive from Best Buy showed up on my old computer properly. I copied over the last few things from my old computer that I wanted on my new computer (I didn't think there was enough to warrant doing a full file transfer, but I did transfer over about 80GB of photos and my iTunes library).
5. I tried to connect the hard drive to my new computer to transfer my iTunes library and a couple other small files. I used the USB adapter that Apple sells. When I plugged it in, it said that it was not readable by the computer (despite having worked on another Mac only minutes before).
6. I updated my new Macbook to Sierra, as it hadn't been updated, thinking that would maybe fix the issue. It did not. I tried to plug it back into my old Macbook Pro and it then said that it wasn't readable on that computer (even though it had worked previously!) In the time in between it working and not working, nothing happened to the hard drive, like it dropping, etc.
7. I had planned to bring my computers and hard drive to either Best Buy or Apple, but today while looking on Western Digital's website, I saw they instructed users not to use USB hubs.

TL;DR: My WD Passport stopped working once I plugged it into my Macbook. Even though the adapter isn't quite a "hub," would this "unreadable" problem possibly be fixed by buying a direct WD cable to USB-C? Or should I bring it in to the Apple Store?