What is it about Western Digital Drives?

macfanuk · 17 Jul 2010 at 00:38

I was always told Western Digital Drives were good but not in my experience. I had one that died about a year and I RMA'd it and got a replacement and now that's died. It initialises but then I just get 'click click click'.

The drive was used in an external caddy and now won't work either in the caddy or plugged into the SATA port of the PC. I have now lost 2 lots of data due to WD drives. Grrrrrrrr.

Sorry for the rant.

macfanuk · 17 Jul 2010 at 03:10

ok leaving my rant aside, can anyone offer me any advice about recovering the data on my drive?

It seems odd because when I boot up my pc, the hard drive fires up as normal and when Windows loads (windows is on a seperate drive), I can go to 'Computer' and see the hard drive (and how much space is remaining) and I can double click on the drive and it'll open but then access becomes very slow and I get the click click click noise. I have managed to copy a few small folders but if I try and copy anything else, it just freezes up.

If anyone has any advice I would really appreciate it.

AbsenceJam · 17 Jul 2010 at 04:40

There's no issue with WD drives, you just had bad luck.

Your drive has bad sectors so check the disk with chkdsk /r or check both boxes if you do it via My Computer. It'll mark off the bad sectors and you should be able to copy things more easily. You could also try running SpinRite first or using unstoppable copier.

Zarf · 17 Jul 2010 at 05:02

AbsenceJam said:
There's no issue with WD drives, you just had bad luck.

This, and i'll add that all the major drive manufacturers are pretty much the same on reliability at the moment.

The WD Raptor drives are generally built to a higher standard though, and SAS drives aimed at the enterprise are usually more reliable than consumer drives too.

AbsenceJam · 17 Jul 2010 at 05:17

Zarf said:
The WD Raptor drives are generally built to a higher standard though, and SAS drives aimed at the enterprise are usually more reliable than consumer drives too.

This isn't correct, studies/papers show that there's no difference. Someone from NetApp did a good one which included this fairly recently.

Michael_10 · 17 Jul 2010 at 10:26

I have a Caviar Blue in my PC, nice and quick but I did expect it to be a bit quieter

macfanuk · 17 Jul 2010 at 11:14

Thanks for the replies. Unfortunately, after switching my PC on this morning, the pc no longer recognises the drive as being there. I'll have a try again later but I'm close to giving up.

Ziggy4 · 20 Jul 2010 at 02:12

You sure it's not some issue with your caddy? WD are in general reliable drives, although you could just be unlucky as someone pointed out above. We lost two WD drives in quick succession on a machine in the office recently. Of course WD were blamed initially but turned out to be a defective controller on the motherboard so I'd consider the caddy as being just as likely to be the culprit.