My 1TB Western Digital Green Power WD10EADS - Dead within Three Months!

Big.Wayne · 22 Mar 2009 at 23:57

Oh **** it, **** it, I was having such a nice weekend too! :eek:

1TB Western Digital Green Power WD10EADS installed three months ago as a data drive in my main PC (ICH10), lightly used and well cooled. Came home last night, woke the PC out of S3 standby and did some surfing, all seems fine, rebooted PC and it wouldn't load the desktop :confused:

Spent 45 mins trying to work out what was going on (ran a diagnostic on the 80GB boot drive, all fine), I then assumed Windows was goofed so I thought I would restore a backup from ACronis I did the other day and thats when I found out the problem . . . . acronis couldn't load the backup from my data drive, uh ohhh . . . .

Unplugged the data drive and the PC booted to the Windows desktop fine! Drive has been tested on different machines, different cables, etc etc . . . it's toast! :rolleyes:

More fool me for not having an active backup, managed to scrape about 30% of the data off it but it's really goofed, lots of bad sectors and lots of read-errors, no warning sign . . . .

I'm now wondering if it was just an unlucky drive or using S3 standby a lot did something to it?

Tomsk · 23 Mar 2009 at 08:59

[scaremonger mode on]
Oh no! All WD drives are rubbish! Samsungs overheat! Seagate can't write firmware! What drives drives will people buy now?????
[scaremonger mode off]

Just unlucky.

BlackBat · 23 Mar 2009 at 09:14

[scaremonger mode on]
Oh no! All WD drives are rubbish! Samsungs overheat! Seagate can't write firmware! What drives drives will people buy now?????
[scaremonger mode off]

Hitachi?

ecat · 23 Mar 2009 at 09:44

BlackBat said:
Hitachi?

Oh no !! Hitachi bought up the old IBM designs, IBM the company that originated the 'Click Of Death' :eek:

Bad luck Wayne. I have 3 1TB WD drives, the only one in active service is fitted to my Topfield PVR, it gets lots of exercise with time-slip enabled, no trouble so far.

bledd · 23 Mar 2009 at 10:21

never rely on a hard drive

rely on 3 or 4

linktoinsanity · 23 Mar 2009 at 10:34

bledd. said:
never rely on a hard drive

rely on 3 or 4

In RAID 0?

Big.Wayne · 23 Mar 2009 at 11:56

Tomsk said:
[scaremonger mode on]

WARNING: WD Green Power drives may kill themselves
Silentpcreview.com

Tomsk said:
[scaremonger mode off]

Just unlucky.

Yeah I guess . . . .

knowlesy · 23 Mar 2009 at 12:00

BlackBat said:
Hitachi?

no lol

Ive never had a problem with wd or maxtor although Ive heard bad reports about maxtor so ive kept away recently

Big.Wayne · 25 Mar 2009 at 00:46

Just a follow-up to my original post, not sure what the heck happened to this drive but even though it's bOrked I managed to salvage vital data but lost my music and video collection and a fair wodge of original digital images!

Got an RMA and have the drive sent off but before I did I had to triple check everything and get the last scraps of data erased, hooked it up via an external magic-gate thingie connected via eSata . . .

Drive was the same whether connected via extermal eSata or direct to the onboard ICH10, look at the state of it in BIOS!

Drive fell over straight away in the WD simple diagnostic test . .

Running the recommended full diagnostic test reveals there are faulty sectors that maybe can be fixed? . . .

Sod this for a laugh, lets just get my last bit of data scrubbed and get the thing sent off, I'm not even sure if the disk will last the *Write Zeros* but it's worth a try . . .

Holy cow, four hours later it actually manages to fill the drive with Zeros, I thought it would just vanish/disconnect itself. Hmmm ok since it has been wiped clean lets give it another quick test just to make sure its suddenly not working now . . .

Oh what's this? . . . it's passing the simple WD diagnostic test now, whats going on?

Lets try the advanced test . . .

Right ok, now its detecting bad sectors again, lets try the WD diagnostics booted direct from optical with the drive attached direct to ICH10 . . .

Ok so as I thought it's ******, what does the SMART info tell me?

Smart says its ok, lets run the HDTune benchmark . . . . oh it crashed!

Finally a HDTune Quick-Scan, grrr what are those little red dots doing on my drive!

Looking closely at the drive for any external sign of weirdness I see nothing unusual apart from maybe some faded-electronics on the PCB, strange as the drive isn't that old? (cutout below shows detail, looks like its been underwater kinda?)

As has been suggested I am a muppet, I am also just probably unlucky but I would like to suggest to any WD10EADS owners that they run a WD diagnostic on their drive for added peace of mind. This drive was flawless and just like that . . . . toast!

Big.Wayne · 5 Apr 2009 at 02:20

Drive was tested faulty by the eTailor and a replacement model was sent out the next day!

Nice new model fresh from the production line, was in two minds whether to sell it or keep it but I gave WD the benefit of the doubt and figured I just got unlucky!

New drive handles a bit differently from the original, reminds me a bit of the original Raptor in as much as it *growls* when seeking, bit noisier than the first but seems nippy enough so fingers crossed!

First thing I did after getting my data back on it was to install Norton Ghost and set up a *daily* automated backup to a networked machine with a spare 320GB laptop drive, think I'm all good now! :cool:

Greenlizard0 · 5 Apr 2009 at 02:26

Big.Wayne said:
First thing I did after getting my data back on it was to install Norton Ghost and set up a *daily* automated backup to a networked machine with a spare 320GB laptop drive, think I'm all good now!

Good stuff.

doggo · 5 Apr 2009 at 17:58

Big Wayne, I thought it was just me having trouble with these drives until I saw your thread.

I'd got four of these drives from ocuk back in December, I got them to go in my two new Qnap TS209s, one of the HDDs was DOA and was replaced quickly by ocuk.

I've been ripping my CD's to one of the Qnap's and have recently finnished that so I thought to myself right it's time to stat on the DVD's. The Qnap that the DVDs are going on had only been used for no more than three or four hours, I'd ripped about a dozen DVDs and started to get error bleeps from the Qnap, looked in the admin page and yep one of the drives was showing as faulty, I've tested it with the WD diagnostic tool and got exactly the same fault as you got failure check point = 97

now that one is back with ocuk under RMA.

I'm getting abit worried now as I've got between 350 - 400gig of music on the other TS209.
I'd read around before buying four of these drives and there didn't seem to be any adverse reports on them.

Big.Wayne · 5 Apr 2009 at 19:19

Dunno mate? :confused:

I mean on one hand hard drives are prone to this kinda thing, I've had errors with all the big brands at one time or another so I'm just putting it down to a bad drive.

I suppose if you bought a few they could all be from a bad batch, really not sure?

The drive I got back (pictured above) seems like a different beast to my first unit, bit quicker and a bit noisier, could just be a small manufacturing tweak or perhaps WD have corrected something?

I'm just gonna let mine run in for a few weeks/months and see how it goes, I suggest you don't take any chances and try and duplicate your important data just in case! :eek: