WD500 External Hard Drive Stopped Working

Recently my Western Digital 500GB external drive stopped working. Fine one day, then no power the next.

Symptoms: No Power at all, no noise or spinning. The power unit itself will light green when not connected to the drive, but as soon as it's attached the green light goes out. If connected the power light will stay light for 1 second, then no power.

This seems to be a common fault with this drive and it would seem obvious that the power supply has failed. However following through the problems these guys had, it would seem it's not the power supply, but the external casing that's causing the drive to fail.

Solution: Rest assured your data is probably still safe, as the hard-drive itself is likely to be fine. You have a couple of options:

1. Buy a new external hard drive casing/enclosure, this costs around £20-30


2. Fit the drive in you Desktop PC as an internal drive.

Seeing as you can buy a new 500GB for under £50, I didn't want to spend £30 on a case. So went with the internal drive method. It's easy to do and if your PC's not too old it'll probably have everything you need inside the case!

First take your external drive to peices, just strip off the outer case until you've freed the drive. It's a standard 3.5" SATA HDD. It has two connectors on the back, the smallest is the SATA DATA connection that connects it to the motherboard, and the longer connector is for power.

In your desktop you'll probably have a spare power socket on a ribbon cable behind your existing drive, you can also use the small SATA cable to connect it to the motherboard.

Boot up your PC and your away! The drive will be recognised in the My Computer window. If your PC's a bit older it may only have IDE connectors, but all is not lost, you can pick up an IDE to SATA converter that'll allow you to connect it up.

I bought a SATA and Power connector from Maplin for just under £4.

Good Luck!