These things (and Seagate’s) have the usb interface soldered on, so if the drivd dies, forget about the data, no way to connect to another usb adapter to try to recover. Granted, it’s usually the drive that dies, but in these cases, you have a 100% rate of non recovery . Any other brand’s are standard drives. My favorite are toshiba.
Why would the USB electronics be particularly likely to fail relative to other electronics on the drive?
Not particularly, but it happens.
I solder new usb connectors and all manner of other connectors on to stuff all the time.
I’m at a 100% success rate getting data off stuff that just needs new connectors.
If you need data recovered, the literal best case scenario is that it’s just got a bad connector.
Soldering is not the problem, unless its smd or tiny, its getting a non standard usb interface.
you mean in the case of a dead USB ic or something or do you mean the USB port isnt standard?
Just don’t look at the failure rates
OMG is it bad. We used a couple WD drives for a surveillance camera array and they didn’t last a year. Two drives failed 9 months apart. Ended up going on Blackblaze and picking what looked best for our XFS Raid 10 having learned that lesson the hard way.
I’ve got the 5TB version of this drive as a backup for my gaming laptop. Haven’t had any problems with it.