ANOTHER dead Western Digital drive here

[BenBurch]

I have had 6 failures in 4 years from a pool of four drives.

I have to say "stay away."

Not worth it for data you want to keep. (And is there any other sort?)

[Zax63]

I always thought WD was one of the better drive makers but about a week ago I had two of WD's MyBook external drives fail at the same time. My computer refused to even recognize that they were plugged in. They were purchased at the same time in September of 2006. I tried them on multiple computers and with different USB cables with no luck. The data was more important than any attempt at a warranty "repair" so I decided it was worth cracking the cases and extracting the drives. Fortunately both drives worked when I put them in an external SATA dock. I'm happy I got my data back but pissed that WD seems to have built the hardware to fail within 3 years. I immediately backed up both drives.

Moral of the story - have at least 2 copies on different devices of anything you have even the slightest interest in keeping.

[BenBurch]

Yeah, I have a multiple backup scheme here, but this is ridiculous.

I extracted the drives (was a dual drive) and have ordered a SATA enclosure for them and will see if they are usable, but had nothing on them that was not elsewhere.

[negativ]

I too had a string of WD failures in a short period of time. Granted, it was about 2 years ago, but it spooked me enough that I'm reluctant to buy WD drives again. I'm sticking with Seagate at the moment.

[Corpse Cruncher]

Sounds similiar to my problem which I am trying to resolve in another thread. I have a Seagate. Looking around for any clues to help me recover the data from it has revealed an unpleasant surprise.

HD's are failing across the board, and it is not down to sole brands it is all of them. Some with my error occur, but all end up with HD failure. It seems to be the large capacity HD's. Mine being a 750 gig and only 15 months old.

From what I have read, it appears the culprit is the OS Windows that is causing these failures. I don't quite understand but those who had a dual boot option with Windows on one partition and linux on another found the linux would boot whereas Windows would not. These problems have been ongoing since 2003. That was as far back as I had read on the particular subject.

All those in affected had in common, Windows OS and had large capacity drives. The difference to computers was vast, some had relatively new systems others, far older machines. Can Windows really handle these new large capacity drives?

[Policenaut]

I don't know. I have about 6 WD portable drives (2.5 and 3.5 sizes) that I have used heavily for the last couple years on Macs and PCs (including editing video off the drives) and I haven't had any problems. Though most of their use has been on Macs.

[KoihimeNakamura]

I've had 2 WD drives. The last one had a short but I don't know how to take out the drive inside it.

That said, though, I've found that they're OK. I still do have plans to get a backup drive again though. (Also, Windows is having no problems with my 1 TB external. Aside from the fact my bios won't boot up with it plugged in)

[Soapy Sam]

I have also had failures in WD drives- one of them a "Mybook" 500GB.
Both were externals.

On the other hand, I've been carrying a Hitachi 20GB drive around the world for 5 years and it works perfectly.
I don't know about software / OS problems, but it seems to me the laptop drives are inherently more shock resistant- being designed, after all, for portability. They are also costlier. What price your data?

[Rat]

Sounds similiar to my problem which I am trying to resolve in another thread. I have a Seagate. Looking around for any clues to help me recover the data from it has revealed an unpleasant surprise.

HD's are failing across the board, and it is not down to sole brands it is all of them. Some with my error occur, but all end up with HD failure. It seems to be the large capacity HD's. Mine being a 750 gig and only 15 months old.

From what I have read, it appears the culprit is the OS Windows that is causing these failures. I don't quite understand but those who had a dual boot option with Windows on one partition and linux on another found the linux would boot whereas Windows would not. These problems have been ongoing since 2003. That was as far back as I had read on the particular subject.

All those in affected had in common, Windows OS and had large capacity drives. The difference to computers was vast, some had relatively new systems others, far older machines. Can Windows really handle these new large capacity drives?
I support about a hundred machines running Windows, and we have a mix of disk sizes and makes. There seems to be no significant difference in failure rates between makes, and I've had no problems with Windows on large drives. This machine (at home) has four terabyte drives in it, two WD (including the boot drive) and two Samsung, and I've had no problems with it. My last machine had no problems with four 750GB drives.

Our backup machine at work has three terabyte Western Digital drives, and they are swapped out every day and written to more or less constantly for about twelve hours a day. We did have a string of failures in Western Digital about 10 years ago, and we steered clear of them for a while, more out of superstition than anything else. We also had a batch of Maxtors fail about five years ago.

So no, Windows has no trouble with large hard drives, and certainly won't cause hardware failure. And there is little difference between brands, with the exception of whole batches of bad drives like the Fujitsu palaver of 2002.

[BenBurch]

Looks like I am having another WD drive go bad on me TODAY. A 1 TB external MyBook. I am going to do the usual things like trying a different FW cable and power supply, but it appears to be quite dead. Good thing I already got in the replacement for its mate and copied all the data to it. This one is a single drive enclosure with a 1 TB drive, the other one was a 1 TB dual drive enclosure with two 500 GB drives. I find this very disappointing.

[Dan O.]

I'm leery of the "book" drives because they don't appear to have sufficient cooling except for very light use. When I use such drives I set them sideways and find something to raise them off the desk so convective cooling air can flow through the vents on the bottom. If I'm doing a long backup to the drive I have a battery powered fan that I use to keep it cool.

[BenBurch]

I suspect it is cooling, though they certainly have a plethora of vents.

[Policenaut]

I have 2 My Books and they never get as hot as some of my custom enclosures do. I could fry an egg on my Nexstar 3. Are you connecting all these failing drives to the same computer? Also maybe try plugging the ac adapter into a different outlet/power strip as your computer if you aren't doing so. It seems odd that you are having such a bad run with these drives. Could be the drives but I'm just guessing there is another factor at play. Or maybe not and it is just a bad batch of hard drives.

[BenBurch]

I have 2 My Books and they never get as hot as some of my custom enclosures do. I could fry an egg on my Nexstar 3. Are you connecting all these failing drives to the same computer? Also maybe try plugging the ac adapter into a different outlet/power strip as your computer if you aren't doing so. It seems odd that you are having such a bad run with these drives. Could be the drives but I'm just guessing there is another factor at play. Or maybe not and it is just a bad batch of hard drives.

Well, all are from different batches. All are plugged into one of three UPS systems. All are plugged into a single unpowered Firewire hub on the same machine. This machine also has about a dozen other drives on it that are not WD manufacture. I have had other drives go bad on me, but the WD drives are worst of all in my experience.

[Dan O.]

You loose most of the surge protection offered by a UPS when you plug multiple components of a system into different circuits.

[BenBurch]

You loose most of the surge protection offered by a UPS when you plug multiple components of a system into different circuits.

While usually true, these are 100% re-synthesizing UPS systems and produce true sine waves at all times. They were expensive.

[Dan O.]

Yes, just about the best surge protection you can get (assuming they are all tied to a common ground). I'd say power was not the issue. Probably the heat as you said.

[MontagK505]

Just to add my input. My other computer has 2 WD drives in a RAID 0 config for drive C:
The system froze eariler today. During re-boot the start-up screen showed one RAID drive had read errors. I'm backing up right now. Time to add another WD POS drive to the other 4 WD drive failures I've had over the last 5yrs. I've never had a MAXTOR drive fail on me.

[Corpse Cruncher]

I support about a hundred machines running Windows, and we have a mix of disk sizes and makes. There seems to be no significant difference in failure rates between makes, and I've had no problems with Windows on large drives. This machine (at home) has four terabyte drives in it, two WD (including the boot drive) and two Samsung, and I've had no problems with it. My last machine had no problems with four 750GB drives.

Our backup machine at work has three terabyte Western Digital drives, and they are swapped out every day and written to more or less constantly for about twelve hours a day. We did have a string of failures in Western Digital about 10 years ago, and we steered clear of them for a while, more out of superstition than anything else. We also had a batch of Maxtors fail about five years ago.

So no, Windows has no trouble with large hard drives, and certainly won't cause hardware failure. And there is little difference between brands, with the exception of whole batches of bad drives like the Fujitsu palaver of 2002.
I will get the link to the site and post it up. You probably understand it more than I do.

From what I gathered was Windows can't handle any larger drives over 137gb. Even with the new updates installed. I don't know what it does but it appeared the problem is Windows causing the failures. It doesn't seem to be just an XP problem, some of those on that site I was looking at had new machines with Vista. So the problem looks like it is across the board.

All those who had dual boot option, ie windows and linus found linux would bootup, whereas windows would not. Why?

The only other thing I could think of was would a virus, aimed at Windows cause this?



Link here (http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/19004/)

[dtugg]

I will get the link to the site and post it up. You probably understand it more than I do.

From what I gathered was Windows can't handle any larger drives over 137gb. Even with the new updates installed. I don't know what it does but it appeared the problem is Windows causing the failures. It doesn't seem to be just an XP problem, some of those on that site I was looking at had new machines with Vista. So the problem looks like it is across the board.

All those who had dual boot option, ie windows and linus found linux would bootup, whereas windows would not. Why?

The only other thing I could think of was would a virus, aimed at Windows cause this?


Link here (http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/19004/)

The 137 GB limit was because the previous standard for hard drive interfaces only allowed for 28 bits of adress space. 228 X 512 bytes per sector equals about 137 GB. The new standard is 48 bit which means that the hard drive can use up to 248 X 512 bytes, or about 144 petabytes (144 million gigabytes). The OS and the motherboard (or controller card if there is one) must also support 48 bit LBA to recognize more than 137 GB on a drive. Windows XP SP1 and probably all motherboards/controllers that were made around that time and later support it. If you are running XP SP1 or later and the can't use more than 137 GB of a hard drive it is because of the motherboard/controller. Flashing the motherboard/controller with the latest bios would likely solve any problems.

[Corpse Cruncher]

It was just an odd coincidence that all the people with the same HD failures all were running Windows. It seemed to at least offer an idea into why these drives were failing. Like I said I don't understand this type of thing.

I just have a HD that something happened to and I'm still trying to find a fix that works.

[BenBurch]

80% of everybody runs Windows, so any group of hardware failures be 4/5 on Windows machines.

[Corpse Cruncher]

80% of everybody runs Windows, so any group of hardware failures be 4/5 on Windows machines.

So I was right it is windows fault. LOL

Like I said I am clueless in this and was looking around for help to resolve my HD problem. That link seemed to provide some explanation. Although I would admit the drive was hot when I pulled it out. I'm still waiting on what Seagate say about what occured on my HD.

[TheDaver]

In WD’s defence…

I have a five year old WD drive in my desktop and it still works great, despite the computer being left on for months at a time and doing many overnight video encoding jobs.

[Corpse Cruncher]

Not sure this helps, but Seagate warrent their HD's for 5 years and will take them back and replace then free of charge.

Might be worth a shot finding out if Western etc do the same.

[a_unique_person]

Not sure this helps, but Seagate warrent their HD's for 5 years and will take them back and replace then free of charge.

Might be worth a shot finding out if Western etc do the same.

Do they give you back the data? ;)

[nimzov]

Not sure this helps, but Seagate warrent their HD's for 5 years and will take them back and replace then free of charge.

Might be worth a shot finding out if Western etc do the same.

It is more difficult now to find drives with 5 years warranty.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3188

nimzo

[moopet]

I would be interested to know how the operating system could influence hardware failure rates. While this is possible, I think it's extremely unlikely.

[BenBurch]

Well, A OS that cached all changed data and wrote it back in organized batches MIGHT be easier on a drive than one that banged on the drive for each dirty block that needed to be flushed, but I doubt the difference would be much.

[Yalius]

And if the power management was poorly coded, the drive might not be allowed to spin down and the temperature could stay high constantly. This occasionally happens with a computer with BIOS that's not strictly ACPI compliant, but has custom drivers for Windows that enable power management. Other OS's aren't so diligently provided for, particularly by OEMs that ship mainly with Windows.

[LordoftheLeftHand]

Don't hate me but I've used at least 2 dozen hard drives over the past decade and I've only ever lost one. The one in question was a Maxor. It made a popping sound and something on the circuit board fried (there was a black mark on the circuit board and a chip was partially melted). I sometimes wonder if the data was still intact on the disk, but it wasn't valuable enough to investigate, so I'll never know.

[a_unique_person]

Well, A OS that cached all changed data and wrote it back in organized batches MIGHT be easier on a drive than one that banged on the drive for each dirty block that needed to be flushed, but I doubt the difference would be much.

Windows will do that, if you want. It's better for the disk controller to do it, though, and have a cache that is it battery backed. We recently bought some system i hardware, and it supposedly only uses grade 'A' disks, whatever that means. They are supposed to fail less often. I have also noticed that the consumer SATA disks seem to come in two grades, with the better stuff carrying a premium price.

[BenBurch]

BTW, I got a dual-SATA enclosure and a pair of 750 GB Seagates from geeks.com for a very reasonable price and replaced the most recent failed drive.