I just recently bought a second WD Caviar Black 1 TB drive to go along with my first WD Caviar Black 1 TB drive. This drive is used to store gigabytes of sound libraries, and then when I write music and play the keyboard, gigabytes of samples are eventually streamed from the second hard drive.
After about two or three hours of writing a song, saving it, and opening up my audio editing program (which uses that secondary harddrive as a secondary place for temp files), it was hanging on initializing. It turns out the second Western Digital drive kept unmounting, would remount, and it was slow. Eventually I forced the application to close, and restarted the computer. The drive wasn’t mounted at first, so I double clicked on the drive and within a few seconds it re-mounted. I tried opening the application again and it hung again. Eventually I had to reboot.
I decided to do a chkdsk on the secondary drive. It would only go to step 2 out of 3 and unexpectedly quit. I tried to do a full chkdsk, step 2 out of 5 it just quit. I tried to do it under the windows gui, and it did the same thing. I tried to copy some of the sound library directories off, and it wouldn’t even try to copy. It would say calculating size, and then it would just disappear.
I didn’t know how to force it to do the chkdsk on a reboot since it wasn’t my primary drive.
However I decided to do one more reboot and it decided to automatically scan the disk at startup (thankfully), which luckily it did the whole scan. It said it made some corrections, and it seems to be functioning fine now.
I’m just wondering, because the two WD Caviar Blacks are right next to each other, could it be possible that it was overheating? Or do these drives handle heat okay?
I’m going to run the WD Diagnostics tonight to see if I get any results that way. I would hate to have it suddenly fail just after a couple weeks of use.
