WD My Book Live Users Are Waking Up to Find Their Hard Drives Completely Wiped

[Tsing]

Image: Western Digital



Western Digital has begun advising owners of its WD My Book Live units to unplug them from the internet following a wave of complaints stemming from its support forum regarding total and unrecoverable data loss. As explained by a number of frustrated users (and later confirmed by Western Digital in a statement), WD My Book Live units around the world have wiped themselves after a threat actor managed to compromise the devices and triggered a factory reset that erased all of their data. Unfortunately, recovery efforts have reportedly been in vain. Western Digital discontinued its My Book Live products in 2015.



Image: Western Digital



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[Dogsofjune]

People use the software that comes on these?

 

[hubaduba]

The only external Western Digital drives I've bought got shucked for use in my NAS.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

The track record WD external drives for me has not been good so I mostly steer clear anymore. Had two different self-powered external ones die in the same year and each was 6-18 months old. I've got a USB-powered one that's mostly been o.k. but it gave me some grief(controller died but I had a USB-SATA adapter that worked, broke open the case, and attached the drive to it) a while back so I really don't trust it after the other two.

On the bright side, we've got a WD red in our Kodi box and it's pretty happy. I've also got a white label drive from NewEgg that turned out to be a WD of some sort and it's been chugging along just fine. Seems like the majority of my bad luck has been with their external green/blue and USB drives.

 

[Brian_B]

The track record WD external drives for me has not been good so I mostly steer clear anymore. Had two different self-powered external ones die in the same year and each was 6-18 months old. I've got a USB-powered one that's mostly been o.k. but it gave me some grief(controller died but I had a USB-SATA adapter that worked, broke open the case, and attached the drive to it) a while back so I really don't trust it after the other two.

On the bright side, we've got a WD red in our Kodi box and it's pretty happy. I've also got a white label drive from NewEgg that turned out to be a WD of some sort and it's been chugging along just fine. Seems like the majority of my bad luck has been with their external green/blue and USB drives.

Yeah, I've had decent luck with WD drives (nothing extraordinary, Hitachi and Toshiba have been rock stars in that regard, although HGST has been owned by WD for a few years now). I did have a batch of WD Reds die early on me - but that was back when Newegg was shipping them bare without any protection. Seagate, on the other hand, I won't touch any more.

Their external enclosures though - yeah. Poor. I have an older TB3 enclosure for a mac that has done well, but anything USB-based just seems to die, and it's usually the junk electronics in the box, not the drive itself. Their online/cloud/NAS thing - utter junk.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

electronics in the box, not the drive itself.

Yep that's what I've found out too. It's a shame I never tried to pry open those other ones to see if they could be salvaged. I only took the chance with the USB one because it was a USB 3.0 and I'd seen how other manufacturers usually used adapters paired to laptop class drives. I was just hoping it was soldered, and thankfully it wasn't. It's still working now paired with a Sabrent USB>Sata adapter I had for some other projects.