I recently bought a new My Book Essential 1TB (WDBACW0010HBK-NESN) to daisychain to my older My Book World Edition 500GB (blue rings) with one of the version 01.xx.xx firmwares.

At first when I connected the USB drive to the MBWE, it showed up in the System Summary section of the administration page without any issue. I was able to set up a new share on the new drive. The administration website moved very, very slow though. The administration pages became nearly unresponsive during this setup process. Once the share was set up I could access the new share but again, it was very slow, now through Windows Explorer. I looked around the internet and it seems that this is caused by the USB drive being formatted with NTFS. I tried reformatting it (again, as NTFS) just to double check and the same problem occurred. I then tried FAT32 but realized it would only support files of approximately 2GB and that is not acceptable for me.

I decided to try a firmware upgrade on the MBWE to version 02.00.19. The firmware upgrade completed successfully but now the MBWE does not display the USB drive in the System Summary like it did with the earlier firmware version. The USB drive works perfectly fine when connected directly to my computer.

Is there a way to solve this issue?