I am on my second Mybook Duo 16tb hard drive in two weeks. I bought the first one on Amazon a couple weeks ago, took it straight out of the box and plugged it in, then did a scan for bad sectors, copied a few hundred GB to it and moved it off of it, and then let it sit. During the copy procedure it reached temperatures of 52 degrees celsius. I figured because it was under serious load it was heating up and standard activity wouldn’t heat it up that much. I let it sit for 5 days without any activity. I got back on my computer and noticed my temperature monitoring software said it was overheating. I checked the logs and it seems the temperature just consistently went up ever since the initial surface test and pegged at 55 degrees celsius. It stayed that way for days, and because that seemed abnormal to me I started looking online for answers and found none.
I contacted WD support and asked them if this was supposed to be in the standard temperature range for this and that my temperature monitoring software just wasn’t aware of this, they said no. They told me the unit was defective and that I needed to send it back. I contacted Amazon and went through their technical support who said the same thing, so I set up an exchange. I sent in the first one and they sent me a second one. I’ve hooked it up and done the same thing I did with the previous one, a surface scan and copy test. This time it heated up to 57 degrees during the initial setup. That’s 5 degrees celsius more than the other drive got to during the initial testing.
After the test I will let it sit and see if it heats back up, but at this point I don’t know if the drives are close to being slagged already or not. I have never had hard drives get this hot, and I have no idea what could be causing it except for the very unlikely scenario that I got two of these that were defective in a row.
They’re in a room with sufficient airflow, sitting next to another external storage device (3rd party enclosure that I’ve placed two WD 6tb Red Pro’s in) and the surface temperature of things in the room is about 20 degrees celsius, the other hard drives in my machine and in the other device don’t pass 35 even with constant copying/surface testing running. I’ve verified it’s not an error in the monitoring software because I have a laser guided infrared thermometer and can point it into the drive from the top to confirm the temperature readings from outside the device without opening it.
Is there another tool that I can use to check the status of these drives? The included software just says “everything’s ok” and doesn’t let me look at the SMART information nor does it let me see the temperature or any kind of acceptable temperature range.
Should I just send them back and get my money back and hope there’s a better product released later?
