x2 Failed M2 drives at the same time?

[Mattcee2]

I bought x3 8TB WD_BLACK SN850X M2 just a few months ago and put them into an OWC Express 4M2 USB4 Enclosure with a raid 0 using Softraid.
All was good until this morning when I booted my PC up and saw a message saying x2 of these drives should be replaced due to failure and I had to proceed to bios to get the PC started.

In Softraid, I couldn't delete the RAID volume and just kept getting random errors and Windows kept giving me I/O read/write errors about the volume - but I could copy files ok although the transfer speed was very up and down and slow.

So i took out the M2 drives and used them as a single drives and went to Disk Management is Windows where i tried to delete the partitions.
Again, this failed with errors such as: 'the semaphore timeout period has expired trying to delete partition' or the system kind of hung and did nothing.

Finally, I went to CMD prompt and tried to use the 'DiskPart command-line tool' but again, got the 'the semaphore timeout period has expired trying to delete partition' error again.

Have these x2 drives actually failed (the third one I was able to get working again with no problem) as it seems quite a co-incidence but I just cannot get the partitions deleted so i can create a new volume and get them working again.

 

[Glanza]

I'm amazed it last that long with you running raid on a usb enclosure, download the WD dashboard and run tests through that on the drives (you'll likely need to do it for warranty purposes to show the drives are failing)

 

[Mattcee2]

I'm amazed it last that long with you running raid on a usb enclosure, download the WD dashboard and run tests through that on the drives (you'll likely need to do it for warranty purposes to show the drives are failing)

Are these enclosures not good then? They are designed for M2 drives with Softraid included?
I've actually only used it maybe 4 times.

 

[Philtor]

I would be looking at the enclosure here also. It could well have an issue that is damaging the drives.

Western Digital are really good so to have 2 drives fail like that is unusual.

Not unheard of mind but I suspect the enclosure.

 

[Mattcee2]

I would be looking at the enclosure here also. It could well have an issue that is damaging the drives.

Western Digital are really good so to have 2 drives fail like that is unusual.

Not unheard of mind but I suspect the enclosure.

Yes, I thought it was very unusual too and am convinced that 2 out of the 3 drives are ruined now. I even tried deleting things on my Mac and that kept giving errors too with no way of erasing things.
Luckily, even though the drives are past the 30 day returns window by a few months, I'm getting full refunds luckily and the enclosure is also going back as still in 30 day return window.

 

[Mcnumpty2323]

Would have tried a secure erase
To see if it worked

Yeah i would consider the enclosure as the
Cause
1 drive failing fair enough
But both at same time very unlikely

If you have 3 x m2 slots on your motherboard
I would use those instead
And put 2 drives in a windows storage space
Or use a pcie card that supports more than 1 x m2
Rather than a usb enclosure