Western Digital Software
'Mac OS Compatible' My Passport, My Book and WD easystore drives formatted with NTFS will mount as a Read Only file system when connected to a macOS. Western Digital's Passport external drive for Mac isn't eternally bound to macOS. By formatting the Passport as an exFAT or FAT32 drive, you can use it with Windows computers, too. Find great deals on eBay for western digital mac. Shop with confidence.
For some, a roomy amount of storage space at an affordable price is top priority in a hard drive-you don’t care if a hard drive looks functional but not stylish. If this is the case, Western Digital’s fits the bill. The My Book Mac Edition is bulky but offers faster-than-expected USB connectivity. The My Book Mac Edition is thick, about as wide and tall as a hardcover book.
It’s a heavy desktop drive and will likely spend its life perched on your desk. Should it fall, I wouldn’t trust it to survive a drop of more than a few feet; the exterior seems poorly equipped to cushion the mechanism inside. Western Digital My Book Mac Edition As the name implies, the My Book Mac Edition is designed for the Mac and is Time Machine-ready. The 1TB capacity in the unit I tested ensures that everyone, save professional video and audio editors, will have plenty of storage space for documents, files, and folders.
Even at its fastest, USB connections are still much slower than FireWire 800, 400, or eSATA. Yet, USB is the most universal connection on the market currently and is compatible with everything from old MacBook G4s to new MacBook Airs. The hard drive mechanism inside the My Book Mac Edition uses Western Digital’s GreenPower technology. Western Digital says that GreenPower helps save power by optimizing the drive’s spin speed, transfer rates, and caching. In our performance tests, the My Book Mac Edition had strong times for an USB-only drive. The drive finished our 1GB copy test in 49 seconds, marginally faster than competing USB-only desktop drives.
In our duplication test, the My Book Mac Edition finished in 1 minute, 14 seconds, the exact same time as Seagate’s ( ) using USB. The My Book Mac Edition produced a new top score for a drive using a USB connection in our low-memory Photoshop test, taking only 1 minute, 31 seconds to complete the test. This bests other desktop drives USB scores and beats the USB-only SimpleTech ( ) by 30 seconds. At $150, the 1TB My Book Mac Edition has a decent price per gigabyte of 15 cents.
While this is slightly better than the 500GB SimpleTech redrive’s price per gigabyte of 19 cents, the current market value of the 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Desk has a price per gigabyte of 11 cents. Timed trials Copy 1GB file to USB 2.0 0:49 Duplicate 1GB file via USB 2.0 1:14 Low-memory Photoshop: USB 2.0 1:31 Scale = Minutes: Seconds How we tested: We ran all tests with the drive connected to a Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz Xeon with Mac OS X 10.5 installed and 1GB of RAM. We tested the drive with each available port. We copied a folder containing 1GB of data from our Mac's hard drive to the external hard drive to test the drive's write speed. We then duplicated that file on the external drive to test both read and write speeds. We also used the drive as a scratch disk when running our low-memory Adobe Photoshop CS3 Suite test. This test is a set of four tasks performed on a 150MB file, with Photoshop's memory set to 25 percent.—Macworld Lab Testing by Chris Holt.
Specifications Price per gigabyte $.15 Connectors USB 2.0 (1) Rotational Speed 7,200rpm Other capacities 2TB ($300) Macworld’s buying advice Generally, larg-capacity drives are for users with massive storage needs, requiring extra space to fit music, videos, and other large-size media files. Moving this much data to a hard drive takes time, and that’s where USB-only devices really come up short. FireWire 800 can transfer files many times faster than USB, which is why OWC’s ( ), equipped with FireWire 800, 400 and USB connections, is a more versatile and practical drive for users with large storage capacity needs. That said, Western Digital continues to produce quality drives designed for the Mac and many users know and trust the brand. If speed isn’t your thing, the name brand cache, large capacity, and comparatively fast USB-connections may satisfy your needs. Chris Holt is an assistant editor for Macworld.
Summary: – “The external hard drive was not recognised by Mac” error can be resolved by using the help of special tips mentioned in this article. Also, Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac Software can be used as a data rescue tool to retrieve the files stored on the external drive. Why Western Digital External Drive Not Recognized Error shows on macOS: On Mac, knowing why a Western Digital drive is not being detected plays a significant role in identifying and resolving the issue. Some of the common issues are:. After a sudden power surge while the drive is being used for file transfer process. If WD suffered physical damage from mishandling or dropping of the Western Digital drive.
Due to abrupt system termination when the drive still connected. Malware on the external drive. Owing to wear and tear of the Western Digital hard drive due to continuous overuse. OS corruption making the WD external drive unrecognized. Tips to Solve Western Digital Hard Drive not Recognising Certain tips could prove helpful in resolving the WD unrecognized error: 1.
Open the Apple’s Disk Utility to see if you can get the Mac to see the Western Digital (WD) drive there. Find Disk Utility by opening Spotlight (Cmd + Spacebar). Then start typing Disk Utility, press enters to open the program. Look in the list on the left to see if the Western Digital (WD) hard drive appears there. You could try running the First Aid through Disk Utility. To do this, click on the “ First Aid” tab and select Run.
If after running First Aid the Mac finds errors, then you can solve it by “ Repair Disk” option 2. If there is no volume listed, the Mac is not able to access the Western Digital (WD) drive.
Western Digital/connect
The Mount option will be greyed out. Make sure your Mac is set to show mounted Western Digital (WD) drives on the desktop. Go to Finder Preferences General and make sure that there is tick beside External Drives. Try another Mac to see if you can access the Western Digital (WD) drive there. Try a Windows computer – perhaps the Western Digital (WD) drive is formatted for Windows and can’t be read by your MacBook, iMac or Mac Mini. Important Note: Formatting the Western Digital (WD) hard drive is another option to retrieve the lost data from an inaccessible Western Digital drive. However, right immediately after formatting the hard drive make sure you do not write anything to it.
Do not store any data or attempt to access the hard drive. All your previous files are recoverable until new ones are overwriting it.
Once the formatting gets finished, immediately disconnect the drive from the computer. You can then recover the lost data by using Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac Software. Software Recommendation for Data Recovery from Western Digital Drive: After the formatting completed, just run the to recover the deleted files and folder stored on Western Digital (WD) external drive. The Mac data recovery software treats any Western Digital (WD) external drive as another hard disk and recovers the inaccessible data from it. Stellar Mac data recovery software provides certain additional features along with basic data recovery option from a hard drive, i.e. Time Machine Recovery, Deleted BootCamp partition, Trash Recovery, Photo Recovery, etc. Author Note: – Although, there are certain other tricks, which can be implemented to solve the “ External Western Digital (WD) hard drive not recognized” error on Mac.
However, the above-listed tips and macOS data recovery software are the ones, which I have used and found great success with them. Meanwhile, if you know any other tricks that deserved a place on his list, then please feel free to share them through the comment section.