External HD Issue... Need some brilliance here

Ok I have this 2tb usb3.0 hard drive its worked lovely since the day I got it. It has barely moved and it's about a quarter full the other day it stopped working. It doesn't get detected at all. Its as if the plug is broken so brilliant as I am I bought a new cable still nothing. And when everything is plugged in I can turn the power button on on the hard drive which i've never had to do before but the computer still doesn't detect it. It does not show up in disk utility on my mac or disk/device manger on windows. I can just get it swapped for a new one but then I would love around 500gb of data.

Your absolutely sure you haven't bumped it while it was operating??

I've had a 500gb external break on me when it was accidentaly kicked while operating.

EDIT: nevermind... I thought you were talking about data corruption...

EDIT #2

If your cable is too long it can restrict the amount of power being transferred from your USB port to the HD

Both cables are the same size and one is the one which came with the hard drive.

Do you mind me asking, what brand is the hard drive?

Never. I find that a great invasion of privacy!!!

jk
Its a Western Digital Mybook Essentials Usb3.0 2TB
I talked to a guy there who said it is possible to just swap them but I have a large collection of files which would be a pain to redownload.

laserpyro said:

Its a Western Digital Mybook Essentials Usb3.0 2TB

Click to expand...

Nice nice!
About your problem: It seems that the drive is realy fucked up! The only thing you could try is to open the drivecase and plug it directly into your computer. The problem is that you will lose your warranty!!!
So you have to decide if the data is worth to lose the warranty!?

Some HD's have a data recovery warranty...

not sure if its an invasion of privacy or not...

I haven't heard of anything like that before!?..0o
Data recovery is pretty expensive so if there is such an option i could imagine it would be costly..

I saw it as an option at dick smith a while ago...

Not sure if it was a one-off deal or if its wide spread amonst portable Harddrives....

hmm, searched a little about that option but can't find anything.
Anyway, Western Digital is a good company...i had a HDD from them a while ago and after approximately 2 years of use it died...
I had send them the dead HDD and 1 week later i received a new one.
After that experience nearly all my HDD's i have are from WD and in future i'll always buy from WD
The Data loss is pretty sad but that's the cost of a none redundant storage. (i have lost also alot of data in HDD deaths..IBM, Samsung, Seagate..and from none of them i received a new HDD!)

Honestly it was just TV shows. So nothing important just a large collection. So I'll just head up to Dicksmith ask About the data recovery but that may be risky considering the contents. I'll see what happens from there.

again, it might of been an offer in my local store only...

No harm in asking though

Oh really damn you'd think a company as big as WD would be reliable is it just the MyBook or just them in general?
Is seagate better?

@HIMNL9: how different experiences can be...0o
I have ~10 WD HDDs with almost 12 TB HD-Videos on it and no problems so far
I hope that this will last a while

laserpyro said:

Oh really damn you'd think a company as big as WD would be reliable is it just the MyBook or just them in general?
Is seagate better?

Click to expand...

regalis said:

@HIMNL9: how different experiences can be...0o
I have ~10 WD HDDs with almost 12 TB HD-Videos on it and no problems so far
I hope that this will last a while

Click to expand...

Well, i have a lot of WD disks, also, both in PCs than in external enclosures (common OEM USB interfaces, like Vector or Lindy ones, NOT WD ones), and usually they never gave me more problems than the other brands ..... as i've said, are ONLY the "mybook" serie ones, that gave me all those problems, so probably is a defective serie of specific products, not the whole production of disks.

As example, i had 2 NAS on 2 (same company) died in 2 weeks time (interface dead, no apparent reasons), and had to ask a person for a specific software for recover the data, cause none of the commercial products available on the market was able to see the "custom" modified FAT/table formatting of those disks (they used a customized version of Linux with a non-standard FAT scheme), and WD custom service said me that they can only exchange the burned boards, not recover the data ..... a third one had the first disk dead, and the RAID internal function was unable to recover the data on the new disk, as instead was stated on the manual ..... another one fried both the disks for overheating, when the fan stopped to work ..... and 2 external USB disks also dead without any apparent reason, one fried the disk PCB, the second shorted the USB chip and blown it (those for the ones sold from me ..... other than this, i had in my shop other 2 external disks from the "mybook" series, not sold from me, with similar problems, from clients that asked me to recover their data) ..... after this, i stopped to sell WD "mybook" products (not the bare disks, they apparently are OK)