BSOD on 2 PC's with newly installed Caviar Blue drives

I very recently purchased 2x Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATAIII 6Gb/s 16MB Cache 3.5 inch Internal Hard Drive OEM  from Amazon.  They were for 2 different PC’s.  I installed them both with no problems and both have been working fine until today.  I was working on my one PC and got the dreaded blue screen of death!  I restarted the PC but over the space of the next 10 minutes or so got the BSOD 3 times.  At first I had no idea what was causing it.  I decided to turn it off and use my other PC to Google the problem.  After a while of using this other PC, this also crashed showing the BSOD!  There is no new software on either PC, no new hardware, and the only thing I’ve done to both is install a 500GB Caviar Blue drive in each.  I keep my PC’s in perfect working order, regularly doing virus scans, malware scans, and keep them backed up, and have never had the BSOD on either PC before, so I’m almost certain these 2 drives have caused this.

Please can anyone let me know if there are any known issues with these drives and whether there’s anything I can do to stop this happening again.  I’ve always had WD drives and have never had a problem previously, but for it to happen to 2 PCs which I’ve installed WD drives to in just over a week is worrying.

What if you set a jumper on pins 5&6 to force SATA II mode in case your MoBo’s don’t support SATA III?

Thanks for the advice.  The drives didn’t come with jumpers so will have to order some.  Once they are fitted if that solves my problem I will report back.

also, how old are the pc’s?  are you sure that the bios on each supports 500 gigs?  I would do a bios update, if it’s possible.

Thanks ThePizzaMatrix, after waiting ages the jumpers finally arrived so I’ve put one on pins 5&6.  I’m hoping that’s an end to the BSOD!  I’ll give it a week or so and if it doesn’t happen again I’ll come back to thank you and click ‘Accept as Solution’.

Hi Wayne, my older PC was purchased in 2005.  The spec is as follows:

Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz 2.99 GHz

Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB (3.50 GB usable)

System type: 32-bit Operating System

My newer PC was purchased in2008.  The spec is:

Processor: Intel(R) Core™2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz 2.34GHz
Installed memory (RAM): 4.00 GB
System type: 64-bit Operating System

The mad thing is I’ve had the BSOD on my newer PC several times since installing the new internal hard drives, but only on the older PC once.  Although my use on the newer PC is probably more resource heavy as it’s my (music) studio PC.

I didn’t realise I’d need to check whethr the bios could support 500GB hard drives.  How would I check this and do you know where I can find out about updating the bios?  Although I’m no expert, I’m sure with some simple instructions I could do it myself quite easily.

you should be able to find out if there is a bios update by going to the support site for either the computer or the motherboard.  500 gb hard drives have only been around for 3-4 years.  but a bsod’s can be caused by irq and/or driver conflicts also.  if you’re using the computers to do music editing and you’re manipulating large files, you could also be dealing with some kind of system corruption.  that’s not to say it isn’t the drives of course.  I would download the dlg diagnostics that wd has and run the tests on the drives to make sure that they’re okay.  then I would start looking at system issues.  you should be able to view the window’s event log to see what’s been going on.

You can try Who Crashed  http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed for a quick BSOD analysis. It might help find something. What OS are you using? I know a couple forums for Windows 7 where some knowledgable people will checkout the dump files.

Joe